Why meaningness?

This web page is the first in an introductory section that explains what meaningness↗︎︎ is, and why you might want to read a book about it.

Every page in the book has a navigation box at the bottom. In this one, you can see the several web pages that make up the introduction.

You might like to read the “general explanation” in the navigation box now, too. Then you can go on to the next page.

An appetizer: purpose

An appetizer: purpose

Let’s start this book in the middle. The main course is a ways off, and I want to give you a taste now.

Let’s talk about purpose. (Purpose is one of the dimensions of meaningness discussed in this book.)

Especially at turning points in life, people ask questions like:

  • Is there any purpose at all in living? Or is everything completely pointless?
  • What am I supposed to do?
  • How can I choose among the many ways I could spend the rest of my life?
  • Does everyone’s life have the same purpose, or does everyone have their own?
  • Where does purpose come from? Does it have some ultimate source, or is it just a personal invention?

Various religions, philosophies, and systems claim to have answers. Some are complicated, and they all seem quite different. When you strip away the details, though, there are only a half dozen fundamental answers. Each is appealing in its own way, but also problematic. Understanding clearly what is right and wrong about each approach can resolve the underlying problem.

Let’s go through these alternatives briefly. I will explain each one in detail in the middle part of the book.

Five confused attitudes to purpose

Everything has a fixed purpose, given by some sort of fundamental ordering principle of the universe. (This might be God, or Fate, or the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, or something.) Humans too have a specific role to play in the proper order of the universe.

This is the stance↗︎︎ of eternalism↗︎︎. It may be comfortable. If you just follow the eternal law, everything will come out right. Unfortunately, it often seems that much of life has no purpose. At any rate, you cannot figure out what it is supposed to be. Priests or other authority figures claim to know what the cosmic purposes are, but their advice often seems wrong for particular situations.

For these reasons, even people who are explicitly committed to eternalism generally fall into other stances at times.

Nothing has any purpose. Life is meaningless. Any purposes you imagine you have are illusions, errors, or lies.

This is the stance of nihilism↗︎︎. It appears quite logical. It might seem to follow naturally from some scientific facts: everything is made of subatomic particles; they certainly don’t have purposes; and you can’t get purpose by glomming together a bunch of purposeless bits.

It is easy to fall into nihilism in moments of despair; but, fortunately, it is difficult to maintain, and hardly anyone holds it for long. Nevertheless, the seemingly compelling logic of nihilism needs an answer. It turns out that it is quite wrong, as a matter again of science and logic. But because that is not obvious, three other stances try (and fail) to find a middle way between eternalism and nihilism.

The supposed cosmic purposes are doubtful at best, but obviously, people do have goals. There are human purposes no one can seriously doubt: survival, health, sex, romance, fame, power, enjoyable experiences, children, beautiful things. Realistically, those are what everyone pursues anyway. You might as well drop the hypocritical pretense of “higher” purposes and go for what you really want.

This is the stance of materialism↗︎︎. Realistically, most people adopt this stance much of the time. However, at times everyone does recognize the value of altruistic and creative purposes, which this stance rejects. Moreover, most recognize that materialism is an endless treadmill: the enjoyment of new goodies wears off quickly, and then you are left craving the next, better thing.

You can’t take it with you. After you are dead, it is meaningless how many toys you had. What matters is how you live your life: whether you create something of beauty or value for others. You have unique capabilities to improve the world, and it’s your responsibility to find and act on your personal gift.

This is the stance of mission↗︎︎. The problem is that no one actually has a “unique personal gift.” God does not have plans for us. People waste a lot of time and effort trying to find “their purpose in life,” and are miserable when they fail. Besides that, rejecting material purposes causes you to overlook genuine opportunities for enjoyment and satisfaction.

Since the universe (or God) does not supply us with purposes, they are human creations. Mostly people mindlessly adopt purposes that are handed to them by society. You need to throw those off, and choose your own purposes, as an act of creative will.

This is the stance of existentialism.1 It is based on the assumption that if purposes are not objective, or externally given, they must be subjective, or internally created. Existentialism holds out hope for freedom. But it is not actually possible to create your own purposes. Choosing at random would be pointless, and impossible; and what purely personal basis could you have for choosing one purpose over another?

Resolving confusion

Each of these confused stances treats meaning as fixed by an external force, or denies meaning or some aspect of it.

The central message of this book is that meaning is real (and cannot be denied), but is fluid (so it cannot be fixed). It is neither objective (given by God) nor subjective (chosen by individuals).

The book offers resolutions to problems of meaning that avoid denial, fixation, and the impossibility of total self-determination. These resolutions are non-obvious, and sometimes unattractive; but they are workable in ways the alternatives are not.

  • 1. Actually, it is more-or-less what existentialists called “authenticity.” Using that term would be confusing, because existentialist “authenticity” hasn’t got all that much to do with the everyday sense of the word.

Preview: eternalism and nihilism

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest, and most extreme, stances toward meaningness.

  • Eternalism says that everything has a definite, true meaning.
  • Nihilism says that nothing really↗︎︎ means anything.

Both these stances are wrong, factually. They are also unworkable, in their implications for living.

However, almost everyone falls into them at times, triggered by particular contexts. Each stance is based on genuine insights, and a powerful, emotionally appealing pattern of thinking. They also can seem to be the only possible alternatives, so we are forced into one by the repulsive qualities of the other.

Understanding the logic of eternalism and nihilism, and the resolution↗︎︎ of the fundamental problem they address, is key to unlocking the material covered in this book. Because they are simple and extreme, the logic of these two stances is particularly clear. The other confused stances↗︎︎ arise mainly as failing attempts to find some compromise between them.

This page is a brief introduction to eternalism, nihilism, and the third possibility that resolves them. I cover the same topics in much greater detail later in the book.

Eternalism and its discontents

Kitschy eternalism easily turns to vengeful self-righteousness

Eternalism and nihilism are both responses to the ambiguity of meaningness↗︎︎. In personal experience, meanings seem to resist focus, shift, and come and go. Moreover, people disagree about what things mean. Perhaps meanings are just a matter of opinion? Meaning is important enough that this uncertainty is emotionally unacceptable.

The strategy of eternalism is to deny↗︎︎ the ambiguity. Despite appearances, it says, everything does have a clear and definite meaning, which is not merely subjective. We might not perceive it, or we might mistake it, but it exists.

If meanings are objective, not human creations, it may seem they must come from some ultimate↗︎︎, transcendent source. In many systems↗︎︎, that is a God. In others, it is an abstraction, like Fate or Reason or the Absolute. These are supposed to provide the sole source of meaning, purpose, value, and ethics. I refer to any such source as an eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ or Cosmic Plan↗︎︎.

Luckily, there is no eternal ordering principle, so eternalism is false as a fact-claim. Arguments about that never seem to persuade anyone, however. So I take this hyper-atheism for granted, and instead ask: what are our options if eternalism is wrong?

Here it is helpful to understand what works, and doesn’t work, about eternalism (and the other confused stances↗︎︎) emotionally, rather than in terms of truth.

The appeal of eternalism is that questions of life-purpose and ethics have clear, simple answers. If you act in accordance with this Cosmic Plan, you are guaranteed a good outcome. You can be assured that seeming chaos and senseless misery are all orderly parts of the will of an all-good principle.

Even if it were factually true, eternalism could not deliver on this sales pitch. The compelling emotional logic breaks down in some contexts. In those situations, adopting the eternalist stance makes you think and act in ways that lead to big trouble.

It is difficult to see how the suffering caused by earthquakes could be willed by a benevolent God, or meaningful, or anything other than disasters that just happened. The difficulty of maintaining willful blindness to meaninglessness is an obstacle to eternalism. It is hard not to fall into the confused stance that most things are God’s will, but not the bad bits. Once you admit that some things are meaningless, the logic of eternalism starts to fall apart.

To defend against that, you have to hallucinate a pastel-colored Disneyfied world in which everything works out for the best in the end, there is a silver lining in every cloud, everyone is beautiful inside, and all the world needs is love.

Threats to this vision must be destroyed. Eternalist kitsch rapidly switches to self-righteous vengeance when contradicted.

Eternalism also requires you to submit to the Cosmic Plan, to do as it demands, rather than pursuing your own goals. It is often unclear what God wants you to do, and sometimes what he wants is insane and harmful. Then you either do the apparently right thing, which erodes your commitment to his ethical code, or you follow the prescription. If that has the expected bad result, you must blind yourself to that, and harden yourself against the temptation to weaken the code to fit reality.

Much good is left undone because eternalism did not recommend it, and much harm is done in its name. We also lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.

Nihilism and its discontents

Nihilism comes out red and black: rage and depression
Official nihilist flag

Nihilism starts from the intelligent recognition that eternalism is false and unworkable. Most events are meaningless; meaning is not objective; there is no Cosmic Plan.

Nihilism then simply inverts the core claim of eternalism: it says everything is really meaningless. Seeming meanings are illusory or arbitrary or subjective, and therefore unreal or unimportant.

This stance is unworkable. Meaning is obvious everywhere, and it takes elaborate intellectualization to explain it away. Attempting to live without significance, purpose, or value leads to rage, anguish, alienation, depression, and exhaustion.

Kitsch is worthy of contempt, but—through fear of being duped again—we extend contempt beyond kitsch to anything that affirms meaning. This makes defiant nihilism actively hostile to more-or-less everything, but particularly beauty, virtue, kindness, and whatever else makes life worth living.

Eternalism blinds us by a simple effort of will, or faith. Such simple stupidity is insufficient for nihilism: it is not possible to use mere force to fool ourselves that there is no meaning in the world. Instead, nihilism uses intelligence against itself to produce stupidity. Somehow meaning must be explained away by intellectual sleight-of-hand. A theory is needed that can distract us from the obvious. This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or so brilliantly insightful as to dazzle us into submission. This intellectual stupidity masquerades as intelligence.

Denying meaning blinds one to beauty, making all reality dull gray. Denying purpose produces paralysis, with no possibility of choice and so no action. Denying significance suggests that there is no urgency to do anything about it.

In depression, you recoil from the overwhelming vastness and complexity of reality. You feel lost in space. You put yourself in a box to create comforting limits. Nihilism shuts down emotions to deny passion.

A false dichotomy, and failing compromises

When in the eternalist stance, it may seem that the only alternative is nihilism, and vice versa. Because each has obvious dire faults, we adopt whichever seems less bad in a particular situation. Because one looks worse, we try to stabilize ourselves in the other, declaring allegiance to it and viewing the opposite as the enemy. But this is impossible. Instead, we often squirm back and forth between the two in a sneaky, panicked way. It’s common for people to switch between eternalism and nihilism repeatedly in the space of a few minutes. Once you start to see this pattern, and catch yourself doing it, it becomes funny.

An alternate strategy is to try to find a compromise. Without thinking about it carefully, we suppose that the world is somewhat governed by an eternal organizing principle (even if we are staunch atheists), and that the world is also somewhat horribly meaningless (even if we are committed eternalists). Some things, we suppose, have definite meaning, and others are definitely meaningless.

The various “confused stances” discussed later in this book arise in this way. Each is a bargain in which we reluctantly acknowledge meaninglessness in some parts of life, deny it in others, and try to get the world to accept that. But it doesn’t; so every compromise causes new trouble, and fails.

The wrong idea underlying all confused stances is that things must be either definitely meaningful or else effectively meaningless. Or, if meaning is not objective, it must be subjective. But these are not the only possibilities.

Completion: meaningness

The complete stance of meaningness resolves the problems of eternalism and nihilism

I have coined the word “meaningness” to express the ambiguous quality of meaningfulness and meaninglessness that we encounter in practice. According to the stance that recognizes meaningness, meaning is real but not definite. It is neither objective nor subjective. It is neither given by an external force nor a human invention.

I call this a “complete stance↗︎︎” because it acknowledges two qualities: nebulosity↗︎︎ or indefiniteness, and pattern↗︎︎ or regularity. A complete stance does not deny↗︎︎ any aspect of meaningness.

From point of view of the complete stance, eternalism and nihilism are each half right. Eternalism rightly recognizes that the world is meaningful to us, and that it must be accepted as it is. This is the acknowledgement of pattern: the world in all its variety, pain and pleasure alike. Nihilism rightly recognizes that there is no eternal source of meaning, so there is no ultimate basis or necessity for rejecting anything. This is the acceptance of nebulosity: the chaos and contingency of the world, and the recognition that we are free from divine law.

What is meaningness?

Diogenes of Sinope by Jean-Léon Gérôme

This book is about meaningness. “Meaningness” is a word I invented, referring to the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless.

The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.

People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.” The book is about matters such as purpose, ethics, and selfhood.

Meaningness is a quality, not a thing. I don’t think there is a definite meaning of life. Meaningness is always nebulous↗︎︎: indefinite, uncertain, ambiguous.

The suffix -ness constantly reminds one of this nebulosity. I mostly avoid the word “meaning,” because it builds in the assumption that something meaningful has one specific meaning. Often, that is wrong.

I use “meaningness” in three closely-related ways, referring to:

It should be clear from context which way I’m using the word in each case.

A curiously missing word

I invented the word “meaningness” because the topic of this book seemed to have no name. There seems to be no -ology or -osophy devoted to it.

There are various -ologies devoted to meanings. For example, semantics studies the meanings of words. This book is not about that.

The various dimensions of meaningness are discussed in religion and philosophy; but, strangely, the topic as a whole is never addressed.

Neither religion nor philosophy

My approach in this book is non-religious and non-philosophical. It is meant for readers who have rejected religious answers. Those who have figured out that philosophy also lacks answers may be even more intrigued.

It will be obvious that the book is non-religious. It’s anti-religious to the extent that most religions are eternalist↗︎︎, and rejection of eternalism is one of my main themes. I take atheism as a given; it’s barely worth mentioning, much less arguing for.

Less obviously, the book is also non-philosophical, and perhaps even anti-philosophical. It is meant as a practical manual. I hope it is useful to anyone who struggles with questions like “what should I do with my life?” and “how ethical should I be?” and “do I have a special destiny, or is my life going to have no meaning beyond the ordinary?”

Isn’t it odd that philosophy has no branch devoted to meaningness? Especially since meaningness is exactly what regular people, who haven’t studied philosophy, usually think philosophy is about?

In ancient times, philosophers did ask the big questions of meaningness. (I’m fond of Diogenes↗︎︎, whose picture heads this page.) Nowadays, big questions are considered embarrassingly naive. The proper job of a philosopher is to make tiny technical corrections in esoteric theories that probably have no connection with reality.

In recent philosophical history, existentialism was an exception. It was willing to ask the important questions. It avoided the error of eternalism↗︎︎, by rejecting definite, objective meanings. However, it wrongly supposed that meaningness is merely subjective, and thereby came to an acknowledged nihilistic↗︎︎ dead end.

Particular branches of current philosophy address particular dimensions of meaningness. For instance, normative moral philosophy↗︎︎ tries to answer some questions about ethics—one dimension of meaningness. Later in the book, I argue that nearly all current ethical theories are either eternalist or nihilist, and therefore wrong. The wrong answers come from asking wrong questions. I will suggest better questions, and beginnings of answers.

Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable

Existential suffering

I was inspired to write this book when I saw many of my friends struggling with the question “what is my true purpose in life?”

This struggle makes you miserable. Finding your “true mission↗︎︎” is difficult. It might seem that it ought to be obvious, but my friends seemed to fail repeatedly. There is no pragmatic, straightforward means to discover your mission; you need to use non-ordinary techniques, such as psychotherapy, divination, or dream work. At times they would be excited because they had finally found it—but a month or two later, they realized they had been mistaken. What they had thought was their true mission turned out not to be. Then they would lapse into depression, for months or years, during which they seemed to do nothing much—just surviving. Of course, they said, since they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing, it was not surprising that they weren’t accomplishing anything.

I think the reason you can’t find your mission in life is that there is no such thing. That answer seems unacceptable, though, if there is only one alternative: materialism↗︎︎.

If there is not something I was put on earth to do, perhaps all that’s left is to join the rat-race of accumulation and personal gratification? But everyone understands that is unsatisfying: a dead end. We have tried materialism, and seen that it fails. You can pursue money, sex, popularity, and power for a while, but either you find you can’t get enough, or it turns to cardboard in your mouth when you do.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Some people pursue mission relentlessly; others materialism. Most flip-flop. In any case, these alternatives both produce disappointment, depression, at times anguish.

This is an example of what we could call “existential suffering” or “spiritual suffering.” It is suffering due to one’s relationship with meaningness↗︎︎. Purpose is one dimension of meaningness.

I believe this kind of suffering is unnecessary. It is caused by wrong attitudes toward meaningness. Those can be replaced with accurate ones, and then you are freed from it.

Of course, most suffering is not existential, or spiritual. Most suffering is practical: concrete circumstances are unsatisfactory. I haven’t got much to say about practical suffering, except that it often has practical solutions. Spiritual suffering is eradicated by replacing supposedly-spiritual problems (like “what is my life purpose?”) with practical ones—which you may be able to make progress on.

Mission and materialism are not the only possibilities. You can, instead, do things that you enjoy and that are useful to others.

“But how do I know what to dedicate my life to?” Wrong question… a good question to ask instead is “What is something I can do now that will be both enjoyable and useful?” That’s a practical problem. You can find answers without using religious or therapeutic voodoo.

It’s an unattractive question, however. “What is my true mission in life?” promises that if only you can find the answer, and you throw your whole self into your mission, you will be a very special↗︎︎ person. Along the way, you will have certainty, and when you die, you will die justified.

“What’s something useful and enjoyable I can do now?” prompts the answer “Who cares—so what?” Mere usefulness and enjoyability doesn’t sound good enough. This “complete stance↗︎︎”—of enjoyable usefulness↗︎︎—is emotionally unattractive at first. Once accepted, though, it does eliminate the anguish of an existential dilemma. If you can let go of the grandiosity that leads you to imagine that some special task awaits you, and the false hope that getting enough of what you want would make life satisfactory, you can be useful and enjoy yourself. That letting-go takes some doing; I will suggest ways to go about it.

This book addresses a series of dilemmas of this sort. I call them “dimensions of meaningness.” Each dimension has a limited number of possible approaches, or “stances↗︎︎.”

The commonly available confused stances↗︎︎ are each unworkable, because they are based on misunderstandings of how meaning works. For example, it is easy to waste a huge amount of emotional energy trying to be special↗︎︎ or ordinary↗︎︎; to while your life away in mindless conformity or unrealistic rebellion; to play the victim or fail when you attempt to take total responsibility for your world. Adopting those stances makes you miserable.

For each dimension, I suggest an uncommon, alternative stance that resolves↗︎︎ the misunderstanding, and turns a spiritual problem into a practical one.

Stances: responses to meaningness

“Stances” are simple patterns of thinking and feeling about meaningness↗︎︎.

This part of the book explains what stances are and how they work in general.

The main part of Meaningness examines specific stances in detail.

Stances trump systems

Stances trump systems

Mostly, people think about thinking about meaning in terms of systems. (By “systems,” I mean religions, philosophies, political ideologies, psychological frameworks, and so on.) But I think that is not how we actually think about meaningness.

When I say “think about thinking about,” I mean that if you ask “How do you think about questions of meaning, value, purpose, or ethics,” the answer is something like “I’m a Christian / existentialist / progressive / Jungian.” Or more likely, nowadays when few people want to commit to a single system, they may mention several.

It seems to me that this is a mistake. In practice, when we actually need to make decisions, we do it mainly on the basis of stances↗︎︎, not systems.

Stances are simple, compelling patterns of thinking and feelings concerning meaningness. For example: “I’m an ordinary guy↗︎︎,” or “the only real purpose in life is to squeeze as much pleasure out of it as you can before you die,” or “good people follow the rules,” or “everyone is responsible for their personal reality.”

Whatever system, or systems, someone believes in, they probably often adopt stances that contradict it. For example, Christians, in everyday life, often act on the basis of materialism↗︎︎. (I have never been a Christian, but I know this by reading books by Christian pastors, who say this is a big problem.) Progressives also fall into materialism—another contradiction. Many professed Christians say that “all is one, really↗︎︎”—the stance of monism↗︎︎—which goes against the central teaching of Christianity.

Systems are big, complicated things with lots of details you are supposed to believe and do. Systems have salespeople, who argue passionately in their favor.

Stances are very simple, and don’t require any specific beliefs or practices. No one explicitly promotes them. You pick them up automatically from our cultural “thought soup↗︎︎.” They are the ways people talk about meaning in soap operas and cafes.

Confused stances↗︎︎ are insidious, because they are unnoticed. Because no one argues for them, no one argues against them. They are memes, mental viruses that people propagate by talking, without awareness of them.

Systems can help stabilize particular stances. Christianity, for instance, tries to stabilize eternalism↗︎︎—the idea that everything has a definite meaning given by God. Its detailed ideology provides support for this idea. If you are Christian and wobbling out of eternalism, it provides things to say to yourself to counteract that.

This works only to a limited extent. The experience of Christians is that “everyone falls into temptation.” That is not only the temptation of unethical actions—more seriously, it is acting on the basis of stances that contradict the religion’s core teachings.

Stances are unstable

In times of crisis, longing, or doubt, one is likely to express one’s feelings to friends somewhat like this:

A lot of the time I don’t know what I should be doing. I mean, regular life is pretty meaningless, isn’t it? I know I must have been put on earth for some reason. I’m an artist, really. I’m not one of those mindless drones who sleepwalks through life. I can see what’s real; that’s the artist’s job. Discover yourself, discover reality. But I’m not sure what my artistic medium is meant to be.

Life basically just sucks, mostly. It seems like there has to be a better way; we can’t be meant to be miserable all the time. There has to be some ultimate purpose to existence.

I guess I do believe in God. I mean, maybe not as some guy up in Heaven, but something way bigger than us. Stuff doesn’t just happen; there has to be a reason for things. I mean, ultimately, it’s all one, isn’t it? I guess you could say I’m spiritual, sort of, but not religious. Organized religion is stupid. It’s all phony niceness. Real life isn’t like that. People walk all over you if you are too nice. You have to look out for yourself.

A lot of the time I think, OK, I’ll do a regular job, I can fit in, I can make a steady salary instead of being a starving artist. I’ve done that, you know? But the corporate world is all rigged against you. You can’t get ahead. We should sweep that away and create a just society, one that works for real people, not the greedy CEOs and politicians. They are the ones making war and polluting the earth and stuff.

I want to make the world a better place. I think most people do. I’ve got some friends who are political, you know, trying to change things. But I don’t see that they are going to make any difference. And anyway, in the long run, what difference could it make? In a hundred years, we’re all dead, and no one’s going to care. Might as well live for the moment, you know!

Because the confused stances↗︎︎ fail to match reality, they are all unstable. As mind-states, they come and go. We flip-flop between them.

The speaker in the monologue above goes through a dozen stances↗︎︎ in a few minutes: nihilism↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎, specialness↗︎︎, eternalism↗︎︎, causality↗︎︎, monism↗︎︎, materialism↗︎︎, reasonable respectability↗︎︎, victim-think↗︎︎, romantic rebellion↗︎︎, and back to mission and materialism again. (You might like to re-read it and pick these out.)

This invented speech may be somewhat exaggerated; usually stances persist a little longer, and it would be unusual to get through so many in a single moan-session. (He sounds like he might have ingested some substance that makes mental states less stable.) But I have often listened sympathetically as a friend in crisis has gone through several contradictory stances in an hour or so.

Because we aren’t aware of stances at all, we don’t notice this happening. We don’t see how dramatically we contradict ourselves.

Once you are aware of relating to meaningness↗︎︎ in terms of such stances, you can catch yourself (and your friends) sliding from one to another like this. The flip-flopping is often accompanied by anxiety, which can produce rebellious negativity or fake sweetness. Those are clues you are caught up in a confused stance. Stances allied to nihilism come with defiant hostility, and those allied to eternalism make you sound like a Hallmark greeting card.

Each confused stance tends to lead to one of a small number of following stances. Each stance has a logic that fails as you pursue it. As that becomes obvious, there is a natural next thought that slides you into a following stance without noticing.

For example, in the stance of respectability, it makes sense to have an ordinary job and fit in. But this involves cutting off your creativity, which is unacceptable. Recognizing this, you may move to the stance of victim-think, if you feel coerced into conformity. That makes you angry, and you think of forcibly changing conditions, in an unrealistic way: the stance of romantic rebellion.

This instability is one reason stances trump systems. No matter how determined you are to stick to a system, the stances that support it will slide out from under you.

Later in the book, I discuss each of the stances in detail, and as part of that I look at the logic that can lead from each to others. That lets you anticipate the wrong moves your thinking is likely to make, and helps counter them.

The antidotes to this whole process are the complete stances↗︎︎. Unfortunately, they too are unstable. They are unstable not because they fail to fit reality, but because they don’t offer the emotional pay-offs the confused stances do.

Once one has decided that the confused stances are unworkable, and that the complete stances are accurate, one can work toward stabilizing the complete ones.

Also, one can work on further destabilizing the confused stances, so they do not persist. Simply recognizing them, and seeing the logic of how they flop from one to the next, is one way to do that.

Nebulosity

Clouds and fields: nebulosity and pattern

“Nebulosity” means “cloud-like-ness.” Meaningness↗︎︎ is cloud-like. It is real, but impossible to completely pin down.

Nebulosity is the key to understanding confusions about meaningness. That is a central point of this book.

Cloud-like

“Nebulosity” refers to the insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous nature of meaningness.1

  • From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin it becomes invisible when you enter it.
  • Clouds often have vague boundaries and no particular shape.
  • It can be impossible to say where one cloud ends and another begins; whether two bits of cloud are connected or not; or to count the number of clouds in a section of the sky.
  • If you watch a cloud for a few minutes, it may change shape and size, or evaporate into nothing. But it is impossible to find an exact moment at which it ceases to exist.
  • It can be impossible to say even whether there is a cloud in a particular place, or not.

Meanings behave in these ways, too.

The nebulosity of meaningness

“Meaning” can apply to many things: words, artworks, or “life,” for example. The meanings even of words can never be fully specified. To varying degrees, they are ambiguous. Art is more extensively indefinite. The matters that might be called “spiritual”—which are major topics in this book—are still more nebulous.

As an easy middling case, let’s consider the nebulosity of the meaning of an artwork, such as a piece of instrumental music:

  • When you think of the work as a whole, its meaningfulness can seem quite solid. But when listening to it, you cannot say “this bit means this, and that bit means that.” The meaning becomes thin and wispy, in a sense.
  • It is very difficult to say anything about what instrumental music means—even when you are sure it is highly meaningful.
  • Music comes in separate pieces (such as songs), maybe with separate meanings. But life does not come in well-defined chunks. Life-meanings are not clearly separable; they flow or shade into each other.
  • What an artwork means can change over time. Some songs that were tremendously meaningful when I was fifteen seem quite meaningless now. The meaning of the carvings of the Rapanui people of Easter Island is mostly permanently lost.
  • Meaningfulness and meaninglessness also shade into each other. It can be impossible to say whether something has meaning or not.

People often disagree about meanings. Sometimes one person is right and the other wrong. However, often the difficulty is not that we don’t know what the true meaning is, but that it is inherently ambiguous. It is a feature of reality, not of knowledge. As we will see later, meaningness is not objective—but it is not subjective, either.

Nebulosity is unwelcome

The nebulosity of meaningness causes various problems: practical, social, and psychological. (Much of this book describes such problems.) Often, people would like to get rid of nebulosity, or pretend that it is not there.

Confused↗︎︎ stances↗︎︎ are attitudes to meaningness that refuse to acknowledge nebulosity. One strategy is to fixate↗︎︎ meanings, attempting to deny their nebulosity by trying to make them solid, eternal, and unambiguous. Another is to deny↗︎︎ meaningfulness altogether, or to say that it is not important, or cannot be known.

Because meaningness is both nebulous and real, these confused stances fail, and cause new, worse problems.

Complete↗︎︎ stances acknowledge nebulosity, and its inseparable partner, pattern↗︎︎.

  • 1. I will not give a precise definition of “nebulosity” here. Instead, I present analogies. I apologize if its meaning seems frustratingly nebulous at this point. Better understanding of the term should emerge gradually as we go along in the book.

Pattern

Clouds with pattern

On the previous page, I explained that meanings, like clouds, are nebulous: insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous. Meanings are also more or less patterned: reliable, clear, distinct, enduring, and definite.

Nebulosity and pattern might seem to contradict each other, but almost always they come together. Meaning is usually nebulous to some extent, and patterned to some extent.

It can be hard to accept that meaningness↗︎︎ is a matter of degree, not either/or. This book is about the confusions that come from assuming meaning must be either totally patterned, or entirely non-existent.

Seeing pattern

Pattern is what makes the world interpretable—what makes it make sense. Perceiving pattern is needed for all effective action—whether you are a person or a bug. Our brains and senses evolved largely to find the patterns that make survival and reproduction possible.

Patterns are everywhere in our experience. The material world is full of patterns: shapes, processes, connections, similarities and differences. Society, culture, thought, and concepts are also patterned.

Since this book is about meaningness, patterns of meaning are particularly relevant.

Being mistaken about pattern

Cloud that looks like a submarine.  Or maybe a shark wearing a hat.  Or something.

Submarine. Or maybe a shark with a big hat. Or something.
(Wikipedia↗︎︎ illustration of pareidolia↗︎︎.)

Psychological research shows that people frequently perceive patterns that are not actually there↗︎︎. The brain automatically interprets even completely random events as meaningful. This tendency is called “patternicity↗︎︎” or “apophenia↗︎︎”.

Extreme apophenia is a symptom of psychosis, hallucinogenic drugs, and much of religious experience. But mild examples are universal. It is impossible not to see faces where there are none↗︎︎.

It is also possible, and common, to miss patterns that do exist. (Science, for instance, could be described as a search for non-obvious patterns.)

The brain, however, seems to be wired to give patterns the benefit of the doubt. It would rather make the mistake of seeing non-existent patterns than of rejecting real ones. (Maybe this is because, during evolution, missing real, dangerous patterns was worse than overreacting to imaginary ones.)

Patternicity, eternalism, and nihilism

GODBUNNY IS WATCHING YOU

The natural tendency to see meaningful patterns, even where there are none, makes humans vulnerable to eternalism↗︎︎. Eternalism is the stance↗︎︎ that everything is meaningful. It is a cognitive form of apophenia (patternicity).

Eternalism is the core stance of most religions. Mistaken perceptions of meanings are a key to the psychology of religion. (A crude but amusing and particularly clear example is the veneration of supposed religious imagery miraculously arising↗︎︎ in random shapes, such as the famous grilled cheese sandwich whose splotches looked like the Virgin Mary’s face↗︎︎.)

The brain’s unwillingness to overlook possible patterns is part of what makes nihilism↗︎︎ less common than eternalism. Nihilism is the rejection of all meaning. Although nearly everyone sometimes adopts↗︎︎ nihilism momentarily, it is difficult to maintain for long. Meaningful patterns are too obvious.

Fixation and denial

Standing on a raft floating in open ocean

There are two fundamental ways to try to reject nebulosity↗︎︎: by fixating or denying meaningness↗︎︎.

Fixation

Fixation is the strategy of insisting that meanings are clear, definite, permanent, discrete, and objectively certain.

Meaningness is like open ocean: vast, unpredictable, always in motion.1 When meaningness appears murky, chaotic, and disputable, fixation is a natural response.

In fixation, you cling to relatively solid fragments of meaningness and try to lash them together into a raft. Standing shakily on a bundle of splinters, you visualize grass beneath your feet, and try not to feel the rocking of the sea. “Here we are on dry land,” you proclaim. “Here we will build a fortress to keep us safe from the chaos of uncertainty.”

You might as well try to build your castle on a cloud. Since meaningness is inherently nebulous, it cannot work. Whenever an unusually big wave comes along, it tips you off your raft and back in the sea. Later in this book, in the eternalism↗︎︎ chapter, we’ll look in detail at common ways you may respond to these inevitable failures. Among these are sentimentality and self-righteous aggression.

Another common reaction: when your own attempts at fixation fail, you may invoke an eternal ordering principle↗︎︎, such as God. These are invented as omnipotent, external forces that fixate meaningness. “God works in mysterious ways. This senseless horror is all part of the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, even though we cannot understand why.”

Denial

Denial is the strategy of refusing to admit that meaningness exists, or insisting that it is unimportant, for example because it is purely subjective.

When it is obvious that certainty is impossible, that meanings can never be established objectively, that ultimately↗︎︎ there is nothing to stand on, denial is a natural response. Meaningness seems too fickle to be relied on. Better to abandon it altogether. Better to try to live in the black emptiness of outer space.

Attempts at denial also always fail, when the pattern↗︎︎ of meaningness becomes obvious. No matter how far you are from a planet, the sky is spangled by pinpoint lights of distant stars.

Again, in the nihilism↗︎︎ chapter, we’ll investigate common responses to failures of denial. These include defiant rage, intellectualization, and depression.

Mirror images

Fixation and denial are both rejections of nebulosity; and in a sense they are the same rejection. Each fixation is also a denial, and vice versa. Each fixation denies the opposite of what it fixates.

For example, the stance↗︎︎ of ethical eternalism↗︎︎ fixates a moral code; but that implies denying ethical ambiguity and freedom. Conversely, ethical nihilism↗︎︎ denies all ethical imperatives, which implies fixating ethical uncertainty.

Confused stances come in pairs

Confused stances come in mirror-image pairs

Confused↗︎︎ stances↗︎︎ are strategies for avoiding accepting nebulosity↗︎︎. Each confused stance applies the basic methods of fixation↗︎︎ and denial↗︎︎ to different aspects of meaningness↗︎︎.

This means that these wrong ideas come in mirror-image pairs. In each pair, one stance fixates what the other denies, and vice versa.

Mirror images

Eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎ are the simplest confused stances. Eternalism attempts to fixate all meaningness. Nihilism attempts to deny all meaningness.

Because meaningness is always both nebulous and patterned↗︎︎, eternalism and nihilism both always fail.

Each of the other confused stances denies some aspect of meaningness and fixates another.1 Therefore, they are attempts at compromise between eternalism and nihilism. These increasingly complicated compromises also fail; every dimension of meaningness is both nebulous and patterned.

As a simple example, the stance of true self↗︎︎ fixates personal continuity. It insists that there is a mental thing within us that is stable, well-defined, and fully separate: the self. It denies personal nebulosity: the inaccessibility, incoherence, variability, transience, and patchwork quality of this supposed self. The mirror-image stance of no-self↗︎︎ fixates personal discontinuity. It denies the pattern of the self: the personality quirks, projects, memories, and relationships that make up an individual.

As a more complicated example, the stances of mission↗︎︎ and materialism↗︎︎ both fixate personal purpose. However, they agree that purposes can be divided into “eternal” and “mundane” ones. Mission then fixates eternal purposes and denies mundane ones. Materialism fixates mundane purposes and denies eternal ones.

Each of these pairs polarizes meaningness into two unworkable extremes. Because both sides of the polarity refuse to recognize nebulosity (in opposite ways) both fail. Surely the truth lies somewhere in-between? Unfortunately, no: finding the middle ground cannot resolve these dilemmas.

  • 1. One can say that even eternalism and nihilism do this, in a sense. Eternalism attempts to deny meaninglessness, and nihilism attempts to fixate it.

No middle way

No middle way

Wrong ideas about meaningness show up as pairs of polarized, opposite stances. These appear to be extreme views. Surely the truth can be found somewhere between?

Unfortunately, no. The error underlying all confused↗︎︎ stances↗︎︎ is their refusal to allow nebulosity↗︎︎. Even if some middle ground could be found, it too would reject nebulosity, and so would also be unworkable.

In fact, it’s usually impossible to find a “middle” position anyway. In each pair of confused stances, one categorically denies what the other fixates.

For instance, the stance of true self↗︎︎ holds that there is a mysterious essence of the person; the stance of selflessness↗︎︎ holds that there is none. The reality of selfness might be described as “between” these extremes, once it is found. But “in the middle” is not a helpful hint for where to look. What is halfway between existence and non-existence?1

To resolve↗︎︎ confusions about meaningness↗︎︎, the helpful instruction is to head in the direction of nebulosity. Since both true self and selflessness are evasions of nebulosity, that direction is at right angles to the line between them.

Muddled middles

Some confused stances do arise as attempts at compromise, or at balancing or synthesizing two extremes. I call these “muddled middles.”

Here’s an example.

  • The stance of mission↗︎︎ holds that only “higher↗︎︎” purposes are really↗︎︎ meaningful. Its emotional payoff is that you get to feel morally superior and special↗︎︎ for pursuing only lofty goals. Its cost is a failure to engage with the mundane aspects of life. Those aspects can be highly satisfying, and can become messy problems for yourself and others if neglected.
  • The mirror-image stance, materialism↗︎︎, holds that only “mundane↗︎︎” purposes are really meaningful. Its emotional payoff is the simplicity and directness of pursuing your own pleasures. Its cost is losing the benefits of higher purposes, for oneself and others.
  • The muddled middle mingles materialism and mission, and fixates both of them. It is the attempt to satisfy both higher and mundane purposes simultaneously. For example, you might pursue fame leading a media campaign to save starving Africans, or pursue groupies and a lucrative recording contract as an “alternative” “rebellious↗︎︎” musician.

In fact, most motivations are mixed. When pursuing higher purposes, one usually hopes for some mundane reward, even if it is only a casual compliment from a friend. This is often sleazy and covert. Authentic compassion and creativity are possible; but there is generally a self-aggrandizing tendency operating at the same time.

This muddled middle preserves both the self-righteous justification of mission and the self-indulgent, self-protective grasping of materialism. So it combines the emotional payoffs of its parent stances. But it also combines their costs. It tends to lose the uncomplicated enjoyment-value of animal satisfaction (because you have to pretend that is not what you seek), and also the unselfconscious compassionate joy of accomplishing higher purposes (because you have subordinated those to a materialist agenda).

The complete↗︎︎ stance that resolves the mission-materialism polarity also recognizes both higher and mundane purposes. However, it allows both to be nebulous. It strips both sorts of purposes of their selfish emotional payoffs, and also avoids the unnecessary emotional costs of both mission and materialism.

  • 1. Buddhism often speaks of a “middle way” between extremes, including the extremes of existence and non-existence. Although this can be useful when understood in specific Buddhist contexts, it seems unhelpful and potentially confusing elsewhere. For instance, in Western thought, based in Christianity and Ancient Greek philosophy, moderation in all things is often recommended. I am not a great fan of moderation; that is not the resolution I recommend in this book. The “complete stance” I advocate accepts and incorporates extremes. In this, my approach is more similar to those of Nietzsche and Vajrayana Buddhism than to the Western or Buddhist mainstreams.

Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning

Clouds are not so bad, after all..

The core of this book is a method for resolving confusions about meaningness.

The method can be applied to many sorts of issues. Any topic that involves meaning and meaninglessness I call a “dimension of meaningness.” (These include, for instance, ethics, purpose, and value.)

For any dimension, the method asks:

  • How does nebulosity↗︎︎ affect the subject? That is, what makes the issue ambiguous, uncertain, changeable, or impossible to categorize?
  • Why is this nebulosity unattractive? What negative emotions does it provoke?
  • How are fixation↗︎︎ and denial↗︎︎ used to avoid acknowledging nebulosity? These two strategies try to nail the issue in place, or deny that it exists at all. They produce pairs of “confused stances↗︎︎,” or wrong attitudes to the subject. Why are fixation and denial appealing in this area?
  • How do fixation and denial fail? (You cannot nail clouds down, but they are still real.) What are the consequences of this failure?
  • Consider the possibility that the nebulosity is unavoidable. This means abandoning fixation and denial. It produces the “complete↗︎︎ stance” for this dimension of meaningness. What are the consequences of the complete stance?
  • Typically, the complete stance is more accurate and helpful than the confused ones, but it seems less attractive. How can one overcome this emotional barrier, in order to adopt the complete stance?

This explanation may seem conceptual and abstract at this point. Meaningness is meant to be useful in everyday life practice. Most of it consists of detailed applications of the method to different dimensions of meaningness.

As we go along, I hope you will gain an intuitive, concrete understanding of the method, through reading examples. Also, we will revisit it with more precision and detail later in the book, when additional relevant concepts will be available.

Not a general dialectic

G.W.F. Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

You might misinterpret the method of resolution I presented on the last page as a “general dialectic,” or means of resolving all false oppositions.

(If you didn’t think that, or if the last sentence made no sense, skip this page. It’s for logic geeks only.)

General dialectics are a big deal in Continental philosophy, particularly in German Idealism. They are popularly associated particularly with Hegel. The system is usually described in terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.1

The method of resolution used in this book critically involves the concept of nebulosity↗︎︎. It proceeds by eliminating mistaken fixations↗︎︎ and denials↗︎︎ of nebulosity. This method cannot resolve false oppositions in which rejection of nebulosity is not the underlying problem.

It is possible that this method could be seen as an instance of some general dialectical system. I would not find that interesting. It is nebulosity, not dialectic, that interests me.

Dialectics are also a big deal in Buddhist philosophy. The central example is Nagarjuña’s explanation of emptiness↗︎︎ in terms of “not existence, non-existence, both, or neither.”

There is probably some sort of connection between nebulosity and emptiness. However, I think non-existence is mostly a red herring, and Nagarjuña’s four-fold logic has no obvious similarity with the method I present.

Confusion, completion, misery and joy

Clouds taste metallic

Earlier, I observed that misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable. I suggest that shifting from confused stances↗︎︎ to complete stances↗︎︎ can eliminate this “spiritual” suffering.

That is the point of this book. I hope it can help accomplish a positive transformation of your experience of meaningness. It is not meant to be an academic, philosophical analysis.

A couple pages back, I described a method for resolving confusions about meaningness. That explanation may have seemed dry and abstract.

On this page, I sketch one example. Although the discussion here is brief, I hope it is concrete enough that you begin to see how and why the method might work to replace unnecessary misery with joy.

An example: ethics

Let’s look at the dimension of ethics. Here are brief answers to the series of questions asked in the method of resolution.

(I will give much more detailed answers later in the book. I’ve also written more about this approach to ethics↗︎︎ elsewhere.)

How does nebulosity manifest in ethics?

We are often faced with moral dilemmas, in which it is unclear what we should do. Usually these are situations in which different ethical norms conflict. For example, one should usually be truthful, but sometimes telling the truth would result in harm.

There doesn’t seem to be any general way of resolving such problems. Similar situations often seem to have dissimilar ethical implications; right action seems to have unlimited dependence on the context.

Why is this unattractive?

We want to do the right thing, but don’t always know what that is. This uncertainty can provoke intense anxiety.

Often we do harm that later we bitterly regret, and punish ourselves accordingly. However, we may not see how we could have avoided it, given ethical uncertainty.

How are fixation and denial used to avoid acknowledging the nebulosity of ethics?

One can try to fixate ethics by formulating totalitarian ethical codes that are supposed to tell you what to do in every situation. This is attractive because it suggests that it is possible to avoid ever being morally culpable—so long as you always follow the code.

Or, one can deny that ethics are meaningful at all, and refuse to take moral responsibility for your actions. This is another way of avoiding culpability.

How do these confused stances fail?

Ethical situations are unboundedly complex and variable. Any finite, fixed set of rules will sometimes require actions that are obviously harmful, for no reason beyond “that’s the rule.” In such cases, you are faced with the horrible choice of violating rules you believed sacred, or creating needless suffering by obeying them.

A fixed code also will fail to promote some beneficial actions in situations that present unusual opportunities.

Refusing to acknowledge ethical imperatives can sometimes work to one’s personal advantage. Obviously, it tends to harm others, though.

It also seems that humans are incapable of consistent ethical nihilism. Humans evolved to be ethical; that is just how our brains work. It’s usually impossible to avoid all shame and guilt. Even sociopaths, whose brains lack ethical function, do not often seem to have satisfactory lives.

What if ethics were unavoidably nebulous?

This opens the possibility of ethical responsiveness coupled with ethical freedom.

If ethics are unavoidably nebulous, in many situations there is no one “right thing” to do. Instead, there are alternatives with subtle trade-offs. We have the duty to pay close attention to the details, while also maintaining openness to the situation as a whole.

We also often have the privilege of choice. Where there is no definite right answer, we are free. We can choose at will. We also have room for creative improvisation: finding ethical solutions that are not applications of general principles.

This stance requires letting go of the fantasy that we could always avoid culpability. We have to accept that, inevitably, we will sometimes make ethical mistakes.

Regretting ethical mistakes makes us less likely to repeat them. However, acknowledging their inevitability means that we can let go of ethical anxiety. Ethical maturity is measured by the ability to find good-enough solutions to ethical problems, not by the amount you punish yourself.

What helps adopt the complete stance?

We need to destabilize the confused stances, by understanding their defects, and stabilize the complete one, by understanding its advantages.

In this case, confusion is destabilized by understanding that it is not feasible to achieve blamelessness, either by following the rules or by denying ethics altogether. Both approaches inevitably cause needless harm to oneself and others.

The complete stance is stabilized by understanding that ethical freedom can be a source of benevolent joy, not mean-spirited selfishness. It is stabilized by understanding that ethical responsiveness eliminates anxiety, and is not an intolerable burden of infinite responsibility without control.

Meaningness as a liberating practice

Breaking the chain of confusion

Mistaken ideas about meaningness↗︎︎ inhibit creativity, constrict your life, and make you miserable. This book is meant as a practical manual for overcoming these confused stances↗︎︎, liberating you from their negative effects. It offers specific antidotes for particular confusions.

Thinking differently

A “stance↗︎︎” is a pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Each of the three reinforces the others two, and helps maintain the stance.

Most methods in this book introduce conceptual understandings that change thinking. However, I’ll make some suggestions about working with feelings and actions too.

The main method is to become familiar with the thoughts, feelings, and patterns of activity characteristic of each confused stance, so that you notice them as they occur; and then choose to think, feel, and act differently. Simply remembering that there is a better alternative—a complete stance↗︎︎—is often most of the battle. However, it’s also necessary to understand how and why this alternative is better, and that can take some work. If the complete stances were obviously better, no one would adopt the confused ones.

Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions” sketched the method briefly. The next page explains further, in terms of various “aspects” of each stance. Meaningness presents increasingly detailed and complex versions↗︎︎ as it goes along.

Similar methods

Cognitive restructuring

Cognitive restructuring↗︎︎ is the central method of cognitive-behavioral therapy↗︎︎ (CBT). Cognitive restructuring is also a practice of “thinking differently,” by noticing patterns of dysfunctional, emotion-laden thought, and replacing them with more accurate and functional ones. CBT, like Meaningness, suggests that patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior reinforce each other. Interestingly, like my approach, CBT draws on Eastern religion and Western philosophy.

The specific patterns of thinking/feeling/acting CBT works with, called cognitive distortions↗︎︎, have almost no overlap with my confused stances. So the method is similar, but the content is mainly quite different. (One point of commonality: CBT aims to overcome “absolutism,” perhaps similar to eternalism↗︎︎. In place of absolutism, it promotes “flexibility,” perhaps similar to the complete stance’s attitude toward nebulosity↗︎︎.)

Unlike CBT, Meaningness is not intended as therapy, and is not concerned with psychopathology. However, because the method is similar, the two might be complementary or synergistic. Perhaps Meaningness offers CBT practitioners an expanded set of dysfunctional patterns to address; I’m not qualified to say.

Rationalism

Several communities aim to improve normal (non-psychopathological) thinking, using a similar method. They identify common patterns of dysfunctional thought; each can be replaced with a better alternative. Among these communities are the rationalist, skeptical, and critical thinking movements.

In early versions, these movements concentrated on logical fallacies↗︎︎—errors in thinking alone. Increasingly, they have recognized the importance of cognitive biases↗︎︎, many of which involve emotions distorting thought.

The lists of these errors (linked in the previous paragraph) have little overlap with my list of confused stances. It seems likely that rationalism, skepticism, and critical thinking can be synergistic with the Meaningness approach. (That is my experience, anyway!) However, rationalism can sometimes slide into eternalism↗︎︎, a dysfunctional, confused stance. I’ll discuss later how to avoid that danger.

Recently, insights about cognitive biases have crossed over with CBT, as cognitive bias modification↗︎︎ therapy. Maybe a three-way synergy is possible!

Meditation

This book grew partly out of my engagement with Buddhist philosophy. That philosophy is closely related to Buddhist meditation methods↗︎︎. I have found that the two support each other—as Buddhism says.

In meditation, you watch yourself thinking, without interfering. Then you discover what you are thinking, and how. It comes as a shock to most people to realize that they actually didn’t know—and another shock to learn the typical contents of their thoughts.

Because meditation reveals the process and content of your thoughts, it’s probably synergistic with any of the three “think differently” methods (Meaningness, CBT, and rationalism). And, indeed, meditation is increasingly combined with CBT to create various crossover therapies↗︎︎. There’s also considerable interest in meditation in the rationalist community.

According to Buddhist theory, meditation eventually allows you to experience “emptiness,” which is closely related to my “nebulosity↗︎︎”; and after that “the nonduality of emptiness and form,” which is related to the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern↗︎︎. That inseparability is the hallmark of the complete stances.

Action

Confused stances make you miserable directly; but even worse, they make you take dysfunctional actions that harm yourself and others. Some helpful interventions can replace dysfunctional actions with functional ones. These include both individual activities and social or group practices.

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p class=”meta_para”>My current (July 2014) plan for this book does not include much material about action, but I’m coming to think it should. So, this may change.

The psychological anatomy of a stance

Dancer taking a peculiar stance

Each stance↗︎︎, or basic attitude toward meaningness↗︎︎, is a transient pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. The Meaningness practice involves learning to recognize these patterns. Then you know what stance you are in at any moment, and ways to shift from any confused stance↗︎︎ to a complete↗︎︎ one.

I describe each stance in terms of a series of aspects. This page explains what the aspects are, and how noticing them is useful.

In the main part of this book, I provide a “schematic overview” page for each dimension of meaningness. The overview includes a table, with rows corresponding to the aspects of the different stances for relating to that dimension.

The discussion on this page may seem unhelpfully abstract. It will probably be useful to go back and forth between reading it and looking at an example schematic. You can see one here, covering eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎—the two most basic confused stances.

If you haven’t already read my introduction to eternalism and nihilism, it would be good to do that first.

The mistaken metaphysical assumption

A confused stance is based on an underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption. The assumption is usually unthought: not understood, or entirely outside awareness. Typically the assumption draws a distinction that is a false dilemma; so confused stances mainly come in pairs, which share the underlying assumption but take opposite sides of it.

Surfacing the assumption, and seeing how it is wrong, makes it possible to understand and adopt the corresponding complete stance.

What it denies and what it fixates

Each confused stance wrongly denies↗︎︎ something about meaningness, and fixates↗︎︎ something else. Stances allied↗︎︎ with eternalism↗︎︎ deny the nebulosity↗︎︎ of a dimension of meaningness, and fixate a pattern↗︎︎. Stances allied with nihilism↗︎︎ deny the pattern and fixate the dimension’s non-existence↗︎︎.

Recognizing how nebulosity and pattern work together moves one into the complete stance↗︎︎ for that dimension.

Pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

When you adopt↗︎︎ a stance, a characteristic texture of thinking, feeling, and acting comes with it. The stance makes that way of being seem sensible. Also, that way of being makes the stance seem sensible.

For example, nihilism↗︎︎ usually dulls your thinking, makes you feel depressed, and inhibits productivity activity. Likewise, when your brain is fogged, you feel hopeless for whatever reason, or you can’t seem to get anything done, nihilism may seem obviously right.

Sales pitch and emotional appeal

The “sales pitch” is a slogan that encapsulates the language used to promote the stance.

A confused stance’s emotional appeal is the reason it is attractive. Each confused stance plays to some need for security, excitement, or self-aggrandizement.

Noticing that you are getting sucked in by the emotional promise made by a confused stance, and knowing that it cannot deliver on them, helps free you from it.

The complete stances are, unfortunately, less emotionally appealing. (Otherwise, we’d adopt them easily.) However, they are more realistic.

How a confused stance causes suffering

Confused stances distort experience by fixating and denying particular sorts of meaningness. When these mistaken perceptions collide with reality, emotional pain results.

Each confused stance produces a characteristic pattern of misunderstanding and misery.

Obstacles to maintaining a stance

The confused stances constantly collide with reality. It is impossible not to see this, and impossible not to suffer the consequences. This makes it impossible to remain consistently in a confused stance; they are always unstable.

A confused stance’s patterns of collision with reality—the obstacles to maintaining it—are resources for switching into a complete stance.

Unfortunately there are obstacles to adopting the complete stances, as well. Generally, complete stances are conceptually obscure, and appear emotionally unsatisfying.

Likely next stances

Because stances are unstable, we frequently stumble from one to another, without being clearly aware that we are doing this. In fact, all of the confused stances described in this book will be thoroughly familiar to every reader.

When a particular obstacle to maintaining one stance arises, there are typical routes into likely next stances. Knowing this, one can recognize an upcoming transition into a confused stance, and re-direct oneself into a complete stance instead.

Antidotes and counter-thoughts

These are ways of getting yourself out of a confused stance.

Simply recognizing that you are caught in one, and remembering that there is a better alternative, is often most of the battle.

Beyond that, one can notice particular confused patterns, and cut through them with specific counter-thoughts.1 Counter-thoughts can work in two ways. Some move from a confused stance to the complete stance. Others destabilize the confused stance, to make it less attractive so that you are more likely to jump to the complete stance spontaneously. (In those cases, though, one needs to guard against simply moving to a different confused stance.)

Intelligent features of a confused stance

Each confused stance is intelligent in some way. If it did not have a powerful logic to it, an almost-truth, we would not get stuck in it. Each approximates a complete stance, which is actually correct.

Noticing how the confused stance you have adopted is nearly right is helpful in several ways:

  • It avoids “I’m a bad person because I fell into a confused stance again,” which is discouraging, and more likely to make you abandon the practice than to continue.
  • It lets you see why you’ve adopted it.
  • It helps point the way to a complete stance that shares the same accurate insight.
  • It is the basis for appropriation↗︎︎—the use of a confused stance to communicate the corresponding complete stance.
  • 1. This is similar to “cognitive shifting↗︎︎,” a psychotherapeutic approach. Apparently its development was influenced by Eastern religion—as Meaningness also was.

Adopting, committing, accomplishing, wavering, appropriating

Adopting a karate stance

A stance↗︎︎ is a basic attitude toward meaningness↗︎︎. A stance is a tool for understanding, from which you may act. This pages defines a series of terms that describe ways you can take up such a tool.

Adopting

To adopt a stance is to use it, at a particular moment, as a way of addressing a problem of meaningness.

For example, to adopt the stance of materialism↗︎︎ means to think about purpose in terms of “mundane” or personal benefit.

As I explained earlier, stances are unstable. Frequently one adopts a stance only for a few seconds or minutes, before abandoning it for another one.

Mostly, people are not aware of the stances they adopt.

Maintaining, committing, rejecting, and stabilizing

To maintain a stance is to adopt it continuously for a longer period.

To commit means to decide to maintain a stance consistently in the future. For example, you might resolve always to adopt mission↗︎︎ as an approach to purpose, rather than materialism.

The various stances that concern a particular dimension of meaningness contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. Committing to one implies rejecting the others. For example, committing to thinking of yourself as ordinary↗︎︎ implies rejecting the stances of specialness↗︎︎ and nobility↗︎︎.

To stabilize a stance means putting in place structures and strategies that support your commitment to it by making it easier to maintain.

Commitment via systems

Although people actually think about meaningness in terms of stances, mostly they think they think about meaningness in terms of “systems.” Systems include religions, philosophies, ideologies, spiritual and psychological frameworks, and so forth.

Because people are mostly not aware of stances, it is somewhat unusual to commit to a stance directly. Instead, people commit to systems, which in turn demand certain stances.

An obvious example: most Western religions require the stance of eternalism↗︎︎. To be a good Christian, you are supposed to adopt eternalism whenever questions of meaningness arise.

Two more examples: some psychological ideologies require the stance of true self↗︎︎; some political ideologies require the stance of romantic rebellion↗︎︎.

Accomplishing

To accomplish a stance means that you actually do consistently adopt it, every time its dimension of meaningness becomes an issue. For example, accomplishing nihilism↗︎︎ would mean that you always regard everything as meaningless.

Accomplishing a stance is difficult. Obvious, everyday evidence constantly contradicts all the confused stances↗︎︎. The complete stances↗︎︎ are subtle and emotionally unsatisfactory.

In most cases, I think accomplishment is impossible in practice. Human beings are not actually put together in a way that makes it possible to see everything as meaningless. (Or everything as meaningful, as would be required to accomplish eternalism.)

Wavering, antidotes, and resolution

If you have committed to a stance, and have not accomplished it, you must apply effort to adopt it in cases in which it doesn’t seem to fit; and you often fail. I call this wavering.

Wavering causes emotional and cognitive problems. I explain what these problems are, for each specific stance, in the main part of this book. For complete stances, I show how to overcome the difficulties. For confused stances, I provide antidotes.

Antidotes destabilize a confused stance with patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that reveal its errors and harms, and that guide you toward adopting the corresponding complete stance instead.

Complete stances resolve confusions by eliminating the tacit metaphysical assumption that produced them.

Appropriating

Each confused stance, although mistaken and often damaging when adopted, is based on a valuable insight. (Otherwise, it would not be attractive at all.)

For example, monism↗︎︎, the idea that “all is One,” is based on the accurate insight that we are not isolated individuals, that there is no hard boundary between self and other, and that things are connected in innumerable ways, many of which we cannot know.

When one adopts a complete stance, the intelligent aspects of confused stances can be appropriated as tools. A complete stance is “complete” in that it incorporates the intelligent parts of the opposed confused stances for that dimension of meaningness. From the standpoint of the complete stance, the confused stances (which everyone understands) can be used to communicate the complete insight, and to draw others to it.

For example, although it is not true that “all is One,” the language of monism may be useful in explaining that things are non-separate—which is true.

Doing meaning better

warrior woman taking a stance

This is the main division of the book Meaningness. After a couple of introductory pages, each of its chapters discusses one dimension of meaningness↗︎︎, and the stances↗︎︎ we take to that dimension.

It discusses both confused stances↗︎︎—dysfunctional, incorrect ways of relating to meaning—and the functional, accurate complete stances↗︎︎. For each confused stance, it suggests antidotes, and ways to shift to the complete stance for its dimension.

The Big Three stance combinations

Three silly stances: a hair metal trio

Complex ideologies↗︎︎ are based on collections of simple stances↗︎︎: fundamental attitudes toward meaningness↗︎︎. Some stances (addressing different dimensions of meaningness) work together well; others clash. Most systems align with one of three common combinations.

These combinations are:

Each of the three primary combinations typically comes with a corresponding collection of secondary stances; I’ll get to that in a minute.

The apparent lack of alternatives

Regarding the fundamental questions of meaning—does it exist, and where does it come from?—these three are the only well-known possibilities. I think all three are wrong; this book advocates a fourth combination of stances (about which I’ll say something at the end of this page).

Each of the Big Three has serious, obvious defects. However, people often commit↗︎︎ to one of them primarily because it looks less bad than the other two.

Understanding this, you can see that much of the rhetoric supporting systems boils down to “less bad”:

  • “God must exist, because otherwise there is no purpose in living, and you have no way of telling right from wrong.”
  • “A God who is someone somewhere else cannot end your alienation from other beings. Enlightenment is possible only here, now. Only by being God can you overcome the isolation and limitations of material embodiment.”
  • “You have to admit that everything is meaningless, because we know God is a fairy tale.”

No monist nihilism

Considering the two primary axes eternalism/nihilism and monism/dualism, there is a fourth possibility: monist nihilism. That is the view that “all is One, and it is meaningless.” Although this is conceptually coherent, it has few (if any) advocates. Apparently it is not emotionally attractive in the way the other combinations are.1

So, in practice, monism always implies eternalism, and nihilism always implies dualism. In the rest of this book, I’ll often speak simply of “monism” or “nihilism,” and you can take the eternalism and dualism for granted.

Other stances in the Big Three combinations

In addition to the four stances to fundamental questions of meaningness, there are stances to more specific dimensions such as purpose, ethics, and the nature of the self. These are commonly folded in with the Big Three combinations when people build ideological systems.

In some cases, the choices are forced. If you think nothing is meaningful (nihilism) then you have to accept that there can be no ethics (ethical nihilism↗︎︎).

More often, the choices of stance toward specific dimensions of meaningness are logically independent. For example, both reasonable respectability↗︎︎ and romantic rebellion↗︎︎ are logically consistent with eternalism.

However, each of the Big Three has a typical emotional texture, which may be more or less compatible with other stances. Dualist eternalism generally combines with reasonable respectability, not romantic rebellion; that is far more likely to go along with nihilism. Dualist eternalism has meaning coming from some Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, and you had better obey what it says.

Most (if not all) systems are somewhat incoherent, and one system may take opposing stances to different specific cases. The psychological instability of stances reinforces this.

Dualist eternalism: typical combinations

The typical2 emotional texture of dualist eternalism is self-righteousness. You are validated by the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.

Typically, dualist eternalism combines with:

Nihilism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of nihilism is defiant negativity. It sucks that the universe is meaningless, but you hate (and want to shout down) eternalists who proclaim the lie of meaningfulness.

Typically, nihilism combines with:

Monism: typical combinations

The typical emotional texture of monism is smug stupidity. Convinced you are God, you believe you understand everything effortlessly, so you don’t need to try to figure anything out.

Typically, monism combines with:

Complete stances align with each other

This book advocates a fourth combination of stances: the ones I describe as complete↗︎︎.

Its typical emotional texture is appreciative curiosity.

Here’s how some complete stances align:

  • Meaningness↗︎︎: things may be meaningful, meaningless, or may be ambiguously between. It’s worth investigating meanings, but you can’t always expect answers.
  • Participation↗︎︎: there is no one right way of drawing boundaries; things can be connected in many different ways, and can also have no significant connection. Finding unexpected connections and redrawing boundaries is often valuable; so is recognizing irrelevance.
  • Intermittently continuing↗︎︎: selfness is valuable and should not be rejected; it can usefully be explored, but it has no essential nature.
  • Enjoyable usefulness↗︎︎: purposes are co-created in an appreciative, compassionate dance with the world.
  • Ethical responsiveness↗︎︎: ethics are not a matter of personal or cultural choice, but are fluid and have no definite source.
  • 1. You might enjoy working out some consequences of monist nihilism. If you are a philosophy geek, you might also wonder whether there are any historical figures who fit the category.
  • 2. These textures are tendencies, not absolutes. Some committed dualist eternalists are free from self-righteousness, for instance.

Schematic overview: all dimensions

This page is a schematic overview of the main part of the book Meaningness. It briefly describes the various stances↗︎︎ one can take to each of the dimensions of meaningness↗︎︎.

The meanings of the rows in the tables are explained in “The psychological anatomy of a stance.”

Meaning and meaninglessness

Stance↗︎︎EternalismNihilismMeaning/ness
SummaryEverything is given a fixed↗︎︎ meaning by an eternal ordering principle (Cosmic Plan↗︎︎)Nothing is really↗︎︎ meaningfulMeaning is nebulous↗︎︎, yet patterned↗︎︎; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎; meaninglessnessPattern↗︎︎; meaningfulness
What it fixates↗︎︎MeaningMeaninglessness
The sales pitchYou are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rulesYou don’t have to care!
Don’t get fooled again
Accurate understanding of meaningness↗︎︎ allows both freedom and purpose
Emotional appealCertainty; understanding; control. Reassurance that if you act in accordance with Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, everything will be well.Intelligence. Also, nothing means anything, so not getting what you want is not a problem.
Pattern of thinkingDeliberate stupidity; sentimentality; self-righteousnessContempt; rage; intellectualization; depression; anxietyJoyful realism
Likely next stancesMission↗︎︎Materialism↗︎︎
AccomplishmentUnify your self with Cosmic Plan↗︎︎Total apathyWizardry↗︎︎
How it causes sufferingAction based on imagined meanings fails; narrowed scope for action; Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ makes insane, harmful demandsHave to blind self to meaningfulness; undermines any practical action
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceDifficulty of blinding oneself to manifestations of nebulosity↗︎︎, and submitting to Cosmic Plan↗︎︎Difficulty of blinding self to manifestations of pattern↗︎︎, and abandoning all desiresUnappealing due to complexity and uncertainty
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsCuriosity; realism; intelligence; enjoyment of nebulosity↗︎︎, meaninglessness, un-knowingEnjoyment of pattern↗︎︎; recovery of passion
Intelligent aspectThere is meaning, and it is not merely subjective, so nihilism↗︎︎ is wrongThere are no inherent, objective, or eternal meanings, so eternalism↗︎︎ is wrong
Positive appropriation after resolutionRespect for pattern↗︎︎ is a compassionate aspect of realismRecognition of nebulosity↗︎︎ is a wisdom aspect of nihilism↗︎︎; nearly-correct understanding of defects of eternalism↗︎︎

Unity, diversity, and separateness

Stance↗︎︎MonismDualismParticipation
SummaryAll is OneI am clearly distinct from everything and everyone elseReality is indivisible but diverse
What it denies↗︎︎Differences, boundaries, specifics, individualityConnection, dynamic interplay, unbounded responsibility
What it fixates↗︎︎Unity; also over-emphasizes connectionBoundaries, separateness, limitations, definitions
The sales pitchYou are GodClarity gives you control
Emotional appealI am all-powerful, all-knowing, immortal, invulnerableI am not contaminated by other beings, and have only specific, limited responsibility for them
Pattern of thinkingWillful stupidityDistrustEngagement
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎, specialness↗︎︎Can combine with either eternalism or nihilism
AccomplishmentDirectly perceive all things as OnePerfect independenceSelf and other neither distinct nor identical
How it causes sufferingHave to blind self to diversity of physical realityAlienation due to being cut off from world and others
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObviousness of diversityObviousness of connectionDifficulty of understanding the philosophical view
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsAppreciation of diversityAppreciation of connectedness
Intelligent aspectI am not entirely separate from anythingThe world is endlessly diverse
Positive appropriation after resolutionProvisional understanding of indivisibilityPoints toward appreciation of diversity

Purpose

Stance↗︎︎MissionMaterialismEnjoyable usefulness
SummaryOnly higher↗︎︎ purposes are meaningfulOnly mundane purposes↗︎︎ are meaningfulAll purposes are meaningful, when they are. Do things that are useful and enjoyable.
What it denies↗︎︎Value of mundane purposes↗︎︎Value of higher purposes↗︎︎
What it fixates↗︎︎Value of higher purposes↗︎︎Value of mundane purposes↗︎︎
The sales pitchFind and follow your true mission↗︎︎, and the universe resonates with youHe who dies with the most toys, winsThere is no scoreboard
Emotional appealExciting, personal, transcendent purpose lifts you out of mundanityGet what you want
Pattern of thinkingFantasy; non-ordinary methods for seeking the supposed true missionGrim self-interestFlow
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎; specialness↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎Nihilism↗︎︎; ordinariness↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, intermittently continuing
AccomplishmentSacrifice all mundane purposes↗︎︎ to eternal mission↗︎︎ (saintliness)Exclusive self-interestRenaissance person
How it causes sufferingCan never find your supposed true mission↗︎︎; neglect mundane aspects of lifeCan never get enough; alienation from others and from authentic creativity
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceReasonable self-interestCompassion, creativity Is that it? No hope of completing purpose, so no hope for salvation or basis for self-congratulation
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsMundane purposes↗︎︎ matter to meI do care about others, and about creative work
Intelligent aspectHigher purposes↗︎︎ are valid; materialism↗︎︎ is unsatisfyingMundane purposes↗︎︎ are valid; mission↗︎︎ is a fantasy
Positive appropriation after resolutionCreativity and generosity are aspects of enjoyable usefulnessMaterial satisfaction and accomplishment are aspects of enjoyable usefulness

Self

Stance↗︎︎The authentic, true, deep selfSelflessnessIntermittently continuing
SummaryThe hidden, true self↗︎︎ is directly connected to the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, bypassing social constrictionsThere is, or should be, no self↗︎︎Selfness comes and goes; it varies over time and has no essential nature
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎ of selfPatterns↗︎︎ of self; the self/other boundary; natural self-interest
What it fixates↗︎︎The patterns↗︎︎ of selfness; the self/other boundaryDiscontinuity; absence of self/other boundary
The sales pitchYour true self↗︎︎ is much more exciting than your yucky regular oneYou can get rid of your yucky regular selfThe patterned↗︎︎ self is unproblematic once its nebulosity↗︎︎ is accepted
Emotional appealI’m much better than I thought I wasI have nothing to lose
Pattern of thinkingRomantic idolization of fantasy selfWillful blindness to continuity and self-interestHumorous affection for one’s foibles; absence of anxiety
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎, monism↗︎︎, specialness↗︎︎Nihilism↗︎︎, ordinariness↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment Authenticity in sense of living from true self↗︎︎ instead of regular selfEgolessnessConjuring supple, playful magic in the shared self/other space
How it causes sufferingAttempts to retrieve supposed true self↗︎︎ fail; attempts to live up to it failNeglecting practical personal affairs
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceNon-existence of true self↗︎︎Manifestations of regular selfFear of discontinuity; cannot repair or remove self
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsNo essential nature, no coherent true self↗︎︎I have much in common with who I was and will be
Intelligent aspectRecognizes negative social conditioning & possibility of spontaneityRecognizes lack of essential nature or durable continuity
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward power of nobility↗︎︎: we can be much more than we generally pretendPoints toward generosity of nobility↗︎︎

Personal value

Stance↗︎︎SpecialnessOrdinarinessNobility
SummaryI have a distinct and superior value given by the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎My value comes from being like everyone elseDeveloping all my abilities in order to serve others
What it denies↗︎︎Shared humanityUnusualness
What it fixates↗︎︎Personal valuePersonal value
The sales pitchYou are better than they areDon’t put on airsBe all you can be
Emotional appealReinforces egoNo need to live up to potential
Pattern of thinkingDisdain; self-aggrandisementFearfulness, lazinessImpeccability
Likely next stancesMission↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎Materialism↗︎︎Enjoyable usefulness
AccomplishmentAutoapotheosisBaaaaaaHeroism
How it causes sufferingEgo-trips; role anxiety; need for constant confirmationSuppression of individuality
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceFamiliarity of experience; maintaining image is exhaustingUnusual impulses; cannot conform to herdSelfishness; fear; laziness
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsRecognition of shared humanityRecognition of potential and uniqueness
Intelligent aspectRecognition of potential and uniquenessRecognition of shared humanity
Positive appropriation after resolutionNobility↗︎︎ does rise above the ordinaryHumility is an aspect of nobility↗︎︎

Capability

Stance↗︎︎Total responsibilityVictim-thinkLight-heartedness
SummaryWe each create our own reality and are responsible for everything that happens in itIt’s not my fault and I am too weak to deal with itPlayfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world
What it denies↗︎︎Contingency, limitsResponsibility, capability, freedom
What it fixates↗︎︎ResponsibilityOverwhelming power of circumstances
The sales pitchPerfect circumstances can be achieved with sufficient effortYou are oppressed and therefore blameless
Emotional appealFantasy of control over futureNo need to make any effortNo need for self-criticism or for anxiety
Pattern of thinkingAggressive, paranoidFearful, depressed, emotionally manipulativeEffortless accomplishment
Likely next stancesSpecialness↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎Ordinariness↗︎︎, materialism↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, ethical responsiveness
AccomplishmentKing of the UniverseHave all needs met by exploiting others’ pityEffortless creativity
How it causes sufferingHypervigilance; can’t meet infinite requirements with finite capacityResentment, depression, neglect of opportunities
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObviousness of limitsObviousness of opportunitiesHard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsLetting go of fantasies of accomplishment; willingness to failGratitude; letting go of payoffs; walking away; practical action
Intelligent aspectRecognition of possibilityRecognition of limits
Positive appropriation after resolutionExperience depends more on our own perception & action than is usually thoughtBecause we have finite capabilities, we can cut ourselves some slack

Ethics

Stance↗︎︎Ethical eternalismEthical nihilismEthical responsiveness
SummaryThe Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ dictates a fixed ethical code according to which we ought to liveEthics is a meaningless human invention and has no real claim on usEthics is centrally important to humans, and is not a matter of choice, but is fluid and has no definite source
What it denies↗︎︎Ambiguity of ethics; freedom; courage; creativityEthical imperativeness
What it fixates↗︎︎Ethical code (rules/laws)Absence of ethical absolutes
The sales pitchCosmic justice guarantees reward/punishment if you obey/defy the ethical codeDo as thou wilt shall be the whole of the LawEthical anxiety is unnecessary
Emotional appealAvoiding blame; preventing others from harming/offending youTake what you want; don’t let morality get in the way
Pattern of thinkingSelf-righteousnessArroganceLight-hearted concern
Likely next stancesReligiosity↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎Secularism↗︎︎, materialism↗︎︎Light-heartedness, nobility↗︎︎
AccomplishmentRemorseless soldier of GodSociopathyEthical maturity
How it causes sufferingHarmful actions are sometimes required by the supposed rules; beneficial ones may not be promotedWithout ethics, harmful actions are just rational self-interest
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceSituations in which ethical rules are unclear or promote obvious harmNatural concern for othersRequires close attention to particulars; no guarantee of blamelessness
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsAllowing ethical ambiguityRespecting ethical imperatives
Intelligent aspectRecognizes the importance of ethicsRecognizes the ambiguity of ethics
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward nobility↗︎︎Points toward ethical maturity

Social authority

Stance↗︎︎Reasonable respectabilityRomantic rebellionFreedom
SummaryContribute to social order by conforming to traditionsMake an artistic statement by defying authorityValue social order as a resource; satirize it as an impediment
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎ of social orderValue of social order
What it fixates↗︎︎Social orderHeroic status of the counter-culture
The sales pitchLaw’n’orderDeath to the oppressors!
Emotional appealIt’s safeIt’s sexy
Pattern of thinkingEmotional constrictionConfused romantic passion, testosterone poisoningPolitical maturity
Likely next stancesOrdinariness↗︎︎; dualism↗︎︎Specialness↗︎︎; mission↗︎︎; nihilistic rage; true self↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, light-heartedness, kadag
AccomplishmentPillar of societyRomantic martyrdom
How it causes sufferingComplicity in oppression; abandoning of responsibility and moral maturityOpposes realistic action to ameliorate conditions; justifies violence
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceSocial conventions stifle expression and opportunitySilly; doomed by definitionUrgency of social imperatives
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsWho cares what they think?I’m being silly and just striking a pose to look cool
Intelligent aspectRecognizes value of social orderRecognizes arbitrary and restrictive character of social order
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward kingly qualities of nobility↗︎︎; society as a beneficial structurePoints toward warrior qualities of nobility↗︎︎; charismatically involving; makes splendid art

Sacredness

Stance↗︎︎ReligiositySecularismKadag
SummaryThe sacred and the profane are clearly distinct in the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎Sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacredBecause nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎ of sacredness; vastnessSacredness; vastness
What it fixates↗︎︎The sacredArbitrariness of perception of sacredness
The sales pitchAvoid contamination through ritual purityFreed from religion, we can get on with practical projectsThe good bits of religion without the dogma
Emotional appealPersonal superiority through religious conformity; minimize uncanniness of vastness by codifying itDon’t have to think about that uncomfortable religion stuff; pretend you don’t see vastness and hope it goes awayCan neither dismiss nor grab onto sacredness
Pattern of thinkingSelf-righteousnessPretending not to care about meaning; apathyAwe
Likely next stancesReasonable respectability, mission↗︎︎, specialness↗︎︎Materialism↗︎︎, ordinariness↗︎︎Freedom
AccomplishmentPerfect ritual purityTotal inability to experience aweAbility to experience anything as sacred
How it causes sufferingParanoia about contamination; resources and opportunities wasted; tribalist vilification Flatness of existence in the absence of the sacred
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObvious mundanity of religious formsSpontaneous religious feelingsInnate reactions of disgust
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsPurity is a matter of perception, not truthI do sometimes experience awe
Intelligent aspectRecognition of sacrednessRecognition that nothing is inherently sacred
Positive appropriation after resolutionSacredness mattersNarrow religion is harmful; something better is available

Contingency

Stance↗︎︎CausalityChaosFlow
SummaryEverything happens for the best, in accord with the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. (Except free will lets us do evil.)The universe is random; nothing happens for any particular reasonThere are no ultimate causes, and causation is nebulous↗︎︎, but we naturally observe patterns↗︎︎
What it denies↗︎︎Pointless sufferingInterpretability
What it fixates↗︎︎Reasons[Nothing]
The sales pitchThere is no need to suffer, so long as you conform to the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎[This is a hard sell ] God is dead. Dance with reality
Emotional appealCan pretend there is no pointless suffering[This may be only a theoretical possibility]
Pattern of thinkingKitschDespairRealism
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎, religiosityNihilism↗︎︎, secularism
AccomplishmentPollyanna, CandideLa Nausé (Sartre)Maximal ability to influence events, without attachment to outcome
How it causes sufferingDenying pointless suffering makes it hard to alleviate[Theoretically, inability to take practical action]
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObviousness of pointless suffering (our own and others’)Obviousness of causalityNo guarantees
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsLots of stuff just happens[Probably not necessary]
Intelligent aspectThings often do make senseThings often are inherently uninterpretable
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward pragmatic competencePoints toward comfort with uncertainty

Meaning and meaninglessness

This book is based on the idea that meaning can be real but nebulous↗︎︎: ambiguous, variable, and context-dependent. This is an uncommon stance.

The more common stances are eternalism↗︎︎ (that meanings are fixed↗︎︎ and well-defined); and nihilism↗︎︎ (that meaning is entirely non-existent). This chapter explains the psychological dynamics of these confused stances↗︎︎ in detail.

The mistaken assumption shared by eternalism and nihilism is that meaning must be objective to be real. Existentialism took an alternative stance, that meanings are subjective and personal. This chapter begins to explain why that is also a mistake. A detailed account must be postponed into the next chapter, which investigates issues of the inside/outside boundary, mind and world, self and other. The view of Meaningness is that all these distinctions are nebulous, and that meaning is neither subjective nor objective. Instead, it is an interaction that crosses all these boundaries.

This chapter also begins to explain the complete stance↗︎︎, which allows for nebulous meaning. It only makes a beginning, because the nebulosity of meaning involves concepts that I can introduce only gradually. Understanding of the nature of meaning will, I hope, accumulate throughout your reading of the book. Ultimately, meaningness is itself a nebulous concept, and cannot be specified with complete precision.

The puzzle of meaningness

Hands with wedding rings

Two years ago, well into a mainly happy marriage, you began a secret affair.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

Your lover—also married—understood parts of you that your spouse did not. You were able to be a different person. You explored aspects of your personality that you had never been able to express before. You made different sorts of jokes. You went on adventurous dates, trying things your spouse—who you knew was sweet but a bit dull when you got married—would never have agreed to do.

After a year and a bit, the passion waned. Your secret meetings began to feel slightly repetitive. You found that your personalities would not be compatible in the long term. You wanted quite different things out of life.

It began to seem you were going through the motions. You had one meaningless fight about nothing. Then you discussed the future, and agreed to end the affair on good terms.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean?

Where did the meaning go?

In the beginning, the affair seemed enormously significant. By the end, it had slid into a casual friendship plus sex.

Were you wrong to think it was meaningful at the start? Was it always meaningless? Or did it have a meaning that it lost?

Perhaps the original meaning lives on in memory, and in the changes in you? You know that the effects of the affair will reverberate for years to come. But what meaning will it have in ten, twenty, thirty years, when life has moved on to other dramas? What could it mean after everyone involved is dead?

How could meaningfulness come and go? To be more than just an opinion, or a feeling, shouldn’t meanings stay the same eternally?

The ethical dimension

“Eternal” reminds you uncomfortably that, of course, there is an ethical dimension to adultery. From the beginning, and all through the affair, you could not ignore that.

You grew up Christian, and you know that any pastor would say that adultery is always wrong. But you left the Church in your teens, when you decided you had to say what was right and wrong in the Bible, not the other way around.

You also have friends who say a married affair is definitely OK—so long as some conditions are met.

But you yourself find it hard to decide whether this one was right, or wrong, or perhaps somehow somewhere in-between.

It was mostly a remarkable and enjoyable experience (with some slightly yuck moments toward the end). If it were not for the ethical concerns, you certainly wouldn’t regret it.

More importantly, you think, its lasting consequences were mainly good. Your lover was quite different in bed from anyone you had been with, and you learned to be more open when making love yourself. That has improved sex in your marriage; your spouse is happy about that.

On the other hand, if you had been caught, it would have hurt several people besides you. Putting innocents at risk must be part of the moral equation.

And there is another lasting effect. You aren’t sure if it is good or bad. Your affair confirmed that something important is missing in your marriage—something you will never get from your spouse. Before, you suspected; now you know. Now, you cannot un-know that.

That is bad for the marriage; but maybe it is good for you. Maybe even for your spouse, in the long run.

You cannot help wondering about other possibilities. Is it realistic to want lasting passion and compatibility?

You do not want to become a serial adulterer in an attempt to find out.

Ethics: what are they good for?

You are introduced to a rather odd woman at a cocktail party. She is deathly pale, with a black leather miniskirt and extensive, spiky tattoos. She sounds normal enough, though, and explains that she teaches philosophy at a local university.

“Oh? That’s interesting,” you say. “What kind of philosophy?”

“Well, um, ethics, actually.”

“Ah,” you say. “Um—I wonder if I could ask you a professional question?”

“Well, if you want personal advice—” she begins, frowning.

“No, sorry! Not like that. You see, I got really interested in ethics recently. I kind of geeked out on it, actually. I read a bunch on the web, and then a couple books. So I learned all about virtue ethics↗︎︎ and deontology↗︎︎ and consequentialism↗︎︎ and stuff. But what I don’t understand is how you would use all that to figure out what to do in a real-life ethical quandary. It seems awfully abstract.”

“Oh dear,” she says, grinning. “You have discovered our dirty little secret.”

“What?”

“Well, you know, most ethicists have the same problem. Our professional work usually isn’t much help when ethical push comes to practical shove.”

“Oh,” you say.

“How does that make you feel?”

You call your friend Susie. After some small talk, you come around to the point. “Susie—I’m not sure how to ask this, but—you remember you told me once about a therapist who was helpful to you?”

She laughs. “Yes, of course. After my first was born—”

“Sam,” you remember.

“Right, Sam. Can you believe he’s in second grade now? Anyway, I had post-partum depression, and Janet was really helpful. Are you OK? Do you want me to give you her number?”

“Yeah, I’m OK, I think. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with me—”

“You don’t have to be crazy to see a therapist, you know!”

“Yeah, I know. But what I remember is your saying that everything seemed meaningless. And—”

“I had all these expectations about what being a mother would be like. And the reality wasn’t anything like that. She helped me figure out how I felt about that.”

“Right, so I’m kind of wondering what something in my life means, I mean meant, so I thought—”

“Sure, of course. Hang on and I’ll look her up. If I can just figure out how this damn phone works…”

Talking with the therapist doesn’t go as smoothly.

“How does that make you feel?” is her mantra. After answering that dozens of times, over several sessions, you finally rebel. “I know how it makes me feel. What I want to know is what it means.”

“Well, what does it mean to you?” she asks.

“But that’s just it,” you say. “I want to know what it actually means. Not just to me. I mean, meaning isn’t just a feeling. Ethics can’t be like that. Some things are just right or wrong, no matter what you feel about them.”

“That seems like quite a polarizing view,” the therapist says. “Maybe things aren’t so black and white… I see our hour is almost up. Next time, perhaps it would be helpful for you to tell me about your parent’s marriage.”

You decide there won’t be a next time.

Meaningness is not mostly ethics

Ethics, you realize, couldn’t answer the question “what did that mean?” anyway. Even if you could be sure whether the affair was right or wrong, the one word “right” or “wrong” would hardly begin to express the meaning of the relationship. Even an explanation of why it was right or wrong would still ignore most of what seemed to matter about it.

The meaning of the affair seems to have many dimensions besides ethics. Yet you find it hard to say what those would be.

Certainly, how you feel about it is another dimension. And how your former lover feels too.

But what it says about you seems more important. You didn’t think you were the sort of person who would cheat—and you still don’t. But apparently you are—because you did.

What else does that imply about you? Are you less trust-worthy than you thought, in other ways?

You felt, in the initial rush, that you had no choice. You tried as hard as you could, you thought, to resist your feelings, and failed. Could you have done differently? Is it just sleazy self-justification to say that you would have had to have been a different person to have chosen differently—and that it is not possible to be anyone other than you are?

But now, in fact, you are not the same person you were. The affair changed you; and that is another dimension of its meaning. Your risk-loving lover gave you a confidence you did not have before. And the affair exposed parts of yourself you were only vaguely aware of. Now those often come into play as you think and feel and relate.

Beyond all that, you suspect there are dimensions of meaning that transcend the personal; that go beyond the effects on anyone involved.

Marriage is a sacrament, according to the Church. It is a contract with God as well as another person. You don’t exactly believe in God any more… but marriage doesn’t seem to just be an agreement between two people, either. Maybe it is society, not God, to whom you are responsible? Marriage is a foundation of society. But whose business is it what you do, if it has no consequences for them?

Besides which, the affair itself seemed at first to have a sacred dimension. Sometimes, making love, the sense that you were separate people dropped away. There was simply intense sensation and exquisite action—with no one there to feel or act. And then sometimes it seemed that it was the entire universe making love. Awareness extended into infinity, and there was the presence of the God you don’t believe in.

But surely that was an illusion. This is just self-justification, isn’t it? It makes no sense at all to talk of self-indulgent pleasure as sacred.

A life lesson

During the affair, you told no one. It was a private thing, just for you and your lover. But now, needing perspective, you confide in two close friends.

Over lunch, you tell Chris the short version. You want to be clear that you are not looking for sympathy or support or advice. You need help figuring out what it meant.

“It’s a life lesson,” says Chris. “The universe always sends you the exact experiences you need to develop your true self. It’s the way you find out what you were really meant to do.”

“But what’s the lesson, then?” you ask. “What am I supposed to do?”

“That’s up to you,” says Chris. “You are totally responsible for your own reality↗︎︎, you know. But you have to use your intuition. I think you think too much, sometimes. I mean, really, reading philosophy books is not going to help you find the meaning of an affair! If you go deeply into your feelings, you will find the answer. Maybe that’s the lesson, in itself!”

Lunch ends a little awkwardly. Chris has fit your experience to a generic spiritual story. Nothing in it takes account of any of the details, of the complex texture of your relationships and your life. What you want to know about is the meaning of your affair, not about meaning in general. You are a bit annoyed that Chris doesn’t understand, or is ignoring what you care about; and you can’t completely hide it. Chris always was a bit of an airhead, you think. In retrospect, not the right person to consult.

You are aware that Chris, in turn, is a bit annoyed, because you are dismissing valuable spiritual insight. You seem excessively skeptical, materialistic, and self-involved.

There is an unspoken agreement: “we won’t talk about this again—and we’ll avoid other topics that would expose our different takes on life.”

Life is for living

You meet Kim for drinks after work. Kim is sensible, and you know won’t get mystical on you.

At first, the discussion seems to go well. Unlike Chris, Kim wants to know about the details. Exactly what was so great about the sex? Where did you go on dates? How did you keep the secret?

After an hour, you start again to be a bit frustrated. What you want to know is what it meant. The details matter—but not every detail matters. It would take a year to tell the total story of a year-long affair; and then what? The story itself is not what matters; it is what it means.

“Why does it have to ‘mean’ something?” asks Kim. “Why can’t you just let it be what it was?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” you say. “What was it?”

“It’s just life,” says Kim. “Life is for living, I guess.”

“What does that mean?” you ask. “That’s what I want to know—how should I live life?”

“You mean, like, is it wrong to have an affair?” asks Kim.

“Well, that’s part of it,” you say.

“Geez, I don’t know,” says Kim. “I guess you only get one life, and the point is to enjoy it. So you have to look out for yourself, and get what you want, some of the time. And, of course, you have to have some kind of ethics. But no harm, no fault. Anyway, it’s over now—why worry about it?”

You nod agreement, but silently you think: That seems too easy.

“So when you did it in the stairwell at Chez Jean’s, were you, like, standing against the wall, or lying down on the landing, or what?” asks Kim.

What kind of world is this?

Neither of your friends’ views was helpful. Chris has a big-picture theory of meaning, which probably came out of some self-help book, but it doesn’t seem to explain anything about your affair. Kim isn’t interested in any meaning beyond the mundane and obvious.

Neither view seems exactly wrong, but both seem to miss what is important. You wonder if somehow they could be combined. Is there a way to understand meaning that takes account of both the big picture and the details?

To be useful, a big picture story has to help make sense of specifics. But, it occurs to you, the meaning of the specifics says a lot about what the big picture has to be.

The world is a very different place depending on whether your affair was definitely wrong (or right), or if that is just a personal opinion—or a cultural agreement.

The world is a very different place depending on whether “the universe” sends you ideal life lessons, or “the universe” is some rocks and gas scattered through vast empty space.

The world is a very different place depending on whether you could have chosen not to begin the affair, or if (being who you are) you could not have acted differently.

The world is a very different place depending on whether somehow the meaning of the affair could become perfectly clear—or if it was inherently nebulous↗︎︎.

Meaningfulness and meaninglessness

No accounting for the vagaries of coke machines

Some things are meaningful; some are meaningless. Some are vaguely in-between.

This is our constant, natural experience in everyday life. It is only in religion, spirituality, and philosophy that people insist that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is.

Insisting that everything is meaningful is eternalism. Insisting that nothing is meaningful is nihilism.

Eternalism and nihilism are the simplest confused stances↗︎︎. Understanding what is wrong with them, and how the complete stance↗︎︎ avoids their confusion, is key to the rest of this book.

Everyday examples

Some experiences are pretty much meaningless. This is true even when they have a positive or negative effect on you.

Your usual bus left two minutes late; the Coke machine mistakenly gave you an extra coin in change; you spilled some of it on your shirt.

So what? Such things just happen. They don’t happen for any particular reason; they’re effectively random. They don’t have any implications beyond their immediate, small effect on you. They don’t tell you anything about yourself or about the universe, beyond the obvious.

You go for a hike alone in the desert, and your arm gets trapped between two rocks. You cannot free it, and after waiting several days for an improbable rescue, you realize you have the choice of cutting off your own arm with a dull knife, or dying of thirst.↗︎︎

Although an accident, this is a meaningful choice. If you survive, you will remember it as a meaningful experience. Though it was an entirely personal adventure, with no direct effect on anyone else, millions of other people are likely to find it meaningful as well↗︎︎.

We speak of “major life events”—marriage; giving birth; death of parent, child, or spouse; life-threatening illness; financial triumph or catastrophe. These are experiences most people would agree were highly meaningful.

So what?

Some things are more meaningful than others, evidently. You might say that meaningfulness and meaninglessness are a matter of degree, not either/or.

That’s not quite right, either, though. In many cases, it is difficult to say how meaningful an event was. This might not be a problem with knowing how meaningful it was, but an inherent nebulosity↗︎︎ of the situation itself.

None of this is mysterious, or should be controversial. In fact, in ordinary circumstances, probably everyone would agree.

Still, there are situations that make it tempting to say that everything is meaningful, or that nothing is. These situations give rise to eternalism and nihilism. The rest of this chapter explains why these temptations arise, why we should resist them, and how.

Extreme examples, eternalism and nihilism

Many people believe in UFOs because they make life meaningful

Why would anyone want to claim that everything is meaningful, or that everything is meaningless, defying our everyday experience that some things are meaningful and some not?

Here I’ll give an example of extreme meaninglessness, and one of extreme meaningfulness. Because it is difficult to deny their meaninglessness and meaningfulness, these help uncover the reasons people might want to do that.

Fear of meaninglessness motivates eternalism

A tiny gray pebble slides half an inch down a slope on a lifeless planet a million light-years from the nearest star. No being ever knows about this, and nothing happens as a result of it.

If anything is meaningless, this is it. So why on earth would you claim this must be meaningful? Only if it is important that absolutely everything is meaningful. And why would that be?

This insistence is motivated by fear: the fear that perhaps everything is meaningless.

If we could definitely say which things are meaningful and which are meaningless, there would be no problem. The meaninglessness of the pebble’s slide would not threaten the meaningfulness of our own lives.

But we cannot always say what has meaning and what does not. We have no hard-line test. Meaningfulness is frustratingly unreliable; transient, uncertain.

There are clues. In everyday experience, it seems that things are meaningful only if they are meaningful to someone. And, mostly things are meaningful only if they have some effect, positive or negative, on someone. The pebble’s slide is meaningless because it fails those tests.

But what about your own life? Things happen that seem meaningful to you. But often they do not seem meaningful to other people—especially if they affect only you. And it is certainly possible to be mistaken about meaningfulness—to suppose things have meanings that they don’t. So isn’t it possible that you are entirely mistaken about meaningfulness? Isn’t it possible that life itself is completely meaningless? That is a profoundly depressing idea.

“Nonsense,” you think. “I know that my life is meaningful to me.” But what good is that? No one else cares about your life the way you do. Maybe your supposed “meaningfulness” is a delusion. Maybe it is purely subjective, and exists only in your own mind. And then, so what? That seems like a meaningless kind of “meaning.”

This is a slippery slope you don’t want to slide down. Since there seem to be no definite criteria for meaningfulness, you cannot rely on anything to have meaning. There is no solid ground under foot, once you admit the nebulosity↗︎︎ of meaningness.

Better to stick a stake in the ground at the top of the hill. If everything is meaningful, then there is no need to sort out what is or isn’t. There is no need to grapple with ambiguity and uncertainty. There is a reliable foundation on which you can build a meaningful life.

This is the stance↗︎︎ of eternalism. Eternalism provides a reassuring firmness, certainty, definiteness to meaning. It says: you are right to care about what you do, because it is truly meaningful.

But what makes everything meaningful? What could give meaning to the pebble?

Here, you must invoke a Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. There has to be a universe-spanning intelligence↗︎︎ that knows everything, and that gives everything meaning. (What meaning? That is not always for humans to know.)

The supposed meaningfulness of the pebble and the Cosmic Plan are mutually reinforcing. The pebble couldn’t be meaningful without the Cosmic Plan. If seemingly meaningless things were not really↗︎︎ meaningful, the Cosmic Plan would have no work to do, and we would have no reason to imagine it.

Since usually things are meaningful only to someone, who likes or dislikes them, you might personalize the Cosmic Plan. God is the “someone” to whom all things are meaningful, and whose preferences gives positive or negative value to all things.

Fear of excessive meaning motivates nihilism

A gigantic spaceship arrives. Astonishingly beautiful aliens emerge, and announce that they are on a diplomatic mission from the Universal Federation of a billion planets.

Humankind, they explain, has reached the point of sophistication where we can join the Federation. We will not, however, join as junior partners. Human beings have a unique spiritual ability not found anywhere else in the universe. This ability is latent in us now, but can easily be developed with tools the aliens will provide.

Unfortunately, the entire universe, with its billions of inhabited planets, will be destroyed just a few years from now. A tiny flaw in the fabric of reality is about to spread across the universe in an instant, like a pin-prick in a balloon, and the whole of space-time will evaporate.

Only the specially-developed spiritual abilities of human beings can prevent this.

The aliens will make us immortal and vastly more intelligent than any human has ever been—a necessary prerequisite to this spiritual development. Naturally, this will make us radically different from the way we were; we will no longer be human.

Having saved the universe, humanity will lead all other intelligent species to a triumphant destiny, a culmination of the ultimate purpose of existence that is now utterly inconceivable.

However, since the aliens do not wish to force anyone to do anything, it is up to us to decide whether to undergo the transformation.

This is a meaningful choice. The fate of the universe, and billions of billions of beings, hangs in the balance.

Suddenly, your nagging back ache, your promotion review at work, and the credit card company’s screw-up that is causing all kinds of havoc—all highly meaningful yesterday—seem totally meaningless. Political parties, religious differences, wars, economics, favorite songs—even these become meaningless by comparison.

The only way to say “this choice would not really be meaningful” is to insist that, no matter how many beings are affected, the apparent meaning is still just subjective. It’s only in the minds of a bunch of random life-forms, who are (after all) just blobs of matter; swirls of subatomic particles. Therefore, it is illusory.

Implicit here again is the view that real meaningfulness could only be objective, and could only be provided by something external to the universe. There is no Cosmic Plan, so nothing is truly meaningful.

This is the stance of nihilism. Nihilism’s improbable insistence on meaninglessness is also motivated by fear. It is the mirror-image fear of eternalism.

The fear is that, if you admit anything is meaningful, then perhaps everything has a fixed meaning—or at least everything in your life.

You don’t want the responsibility of dealing with the intricacies, implications, and imperatives of all that meaningfulness. And if everything had a specific meaning, there would be no room for creativity. You would have no freedom.

Perhaps worst of all, you might have to accept a lot of sentimental claptrap—the nonsense eternalists spout in a desperate attempt to justify their delusions.

Meaningness without a Cosmic Plan

Eternalism and nihilism exist only out of fear of each other. There is a better alternative—what I call the complete stance↗︎︎.

I suggest that meaningfulness is not provided by a Cosmic Plan. There is no Cosmic Plan; but that does not mean that nothing is meaningful.

I suggest that some things are meaningful, and some things are not. That is true even though we have no definite criteria to decide which is which.

I suggest that meaningness is neither objective, nor subjective.

Accepting these suggestions allows you to let go of the unrealistic fears that motivate both eternalism and nihilism.

This complete view of meaningness has its own implications. They may seem to make life more complicated. However, the complete stance also eliminates the many troubles eternalism and nihilism cause.

So how does meaningness work?

Machinery

This far into the book, you may be impatient. I’ve said a lot about how meaningness↗︎︎ doesn’t work. But how does it work? I have said almost nothing, other than that it is nebulous↗︎︎. How unsatisfactory!

I would love to tell you exactly what meaning is. I’d love to explain Life, The Universe, and Everything in a way that solves all your problems.

Unfortunately, I can’t—and neither can anyone else. That sucks; but this is the actual situation we are in.

We have a choice of explanations of meaningness: ones that are simple, clear, harmful, and wrong; or ones that are complex, vague, helpful, and approximately right. I prefer the latter.

It seems to me that:

  • No one can say quite how meaning works.
  • Theories that pretend to explain are either eternalist or nihilist, and both are wrong and harmful.1
  • We aren’t likely to get a full explanation any time soon.
  • We can’t wait for a perfect understanding of meaning, because we have to live life now.
  • So we have to accept that our understanding is incomplete, and do the best we can. Life is fired at us point-blank;2 issues of ethics and purpose won’t wait for someone to find a perfect theory.
  • We can form a partial understanding of meaningness. We are not entirely ignorant, and vague understanding is better than none.
  • Incomplete understanding is not a huge obstacle to sensible action—which is another reason waiting for a perfect theory would be senseless.

This book will, eventually, say a lot about how meaningness works. Some of that will be intuitive and impressionistic. I hope understanding will accumulate as you read brief partial explanations, and examples in passing.

Some other discussions will be quite technical; perhaps most readers will want to skip over those. In any case, I am postponing most into the chapter on monism and dualism, which develops some necessary concepts.

But here’s a preview.

The natural human view is that meanings are inherent in external things. Thunder means the gods are angry, and that’s a fact about thunder and gods, not about people. So on this view, meanings are objective: external to us. They are the same for everyone.

When “same for everyone” ran into differences of opinion, monotheism moved all meanings into God instead. God gives everything ultimate↗︎︎ meanings, that no one may disagree with. God is external, so monotheistic meaning is also objective.

Then God died, and the world was disenchanted, so objects all became inherently meaningless dead matter. That meant meanings can’t be objective. The obvious alternative—developed in the 1700s—was that meanings are subjective. They live in the minds of individual people.

250 years later, versions of this idea are still taken for granted by most sophisticated people. Unfortunately, the subjective theory of meaning doesn’t work. It verges on nihilism↗︎︎—outright denial of all meaning. Fortunately, the theory is also not true.

When you are hungry, the meaning of food is not subjective. You, personally, are hungry, but the meaning is shared with everyone else (and probably all other vertebrate animals). It’s not particularly “mental”; it’s as much in your sensory organs, and digestive system, as in your brain. And it’s in the actions of your hands and mouth as you eat.

The meaning of a handshake is partly arbitrary, but it is not subjective. You can’t redefine it to make it mean what you want. When you shake hands, the meaning depends on a huge amount of cultural background, involving millions of people. It probably also depends on evolved biological functions we don’t know much about.

The subjective theory of meaning is not full-blown nihilism, but tends to slide into it. That’s because we actually can’t mean anything much by ourselves; meaning is mostly a social and cultural activity. Narrowing one’s focus to supposedly personal meanings leads to social and cultural alienation, and then to nihilistic depression.

A meaning is neither subjective nor objective; it is not inside your mind, nor outside. It requires both subjects and objects, and it doesn’t dwell in either. It takes time and space, but it is not precisely located.

Especially, a meaning does not live in your brain. That popular pseudoscientific idea is the “representational theory of mind.” It is internally contradictory and unworkable. Meaning may require a brain, but usually many brains, and also non-brain stuff.

Meaningness is a dynamic, interactive process. Any particular meaning involves a complicated history of many creatures and things; a network of involvement that we only ever partly understand.

A meaning always appears nebulous to us, because we never know everything about it. This is, in philosophical terms, a epistemological fact: about us. I believe that meanings are also actually nebulous. That is an ontological theory, about meaningness. I’ll discuss this technically, later in the book. However, epistemological nebulosity is enough for practical purposes.

We have to live as if meaningness is nebulous, whether it ultimately is or not. This book is about how.

  • 1. Eternalist theories pretend to have detailed understandings that are, in fact, mistaken. Acting on these wrong understandings has bad results—as you’d expect. Nihilist theories suggest that, since full understanding is impossible, we should pretend that everything is meaningless. That would allow us to evade responsibility for our lives; but we can’t actually get away with that, either.
  • 2. “We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now,’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.” —Jose Ortega y Gasset

Schematic overview: meaningness

This table summarizes three stances↗︎︎ one can take to the most fundamental questions of meaning.

For an introduction to these stances, see “Preview: eternalism and nihilism.” The main discussion begins here.

The meanings of the rows in this table are explained in “The psychological anatomy of a stance.”

Stance↗︎︎EternalismNihilismMeaning/ness
SummaryEverything is given a fixed↗︎︎ meaning by an eternal ordering principle (Cosmic Plan↗︎︎)Nothing is really↗︎︎ meaningfulMeaning is nebulous↗︎︎, yet patterned↗︎︎; meaningfulness and meaninglessness intermingle
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎; meaninglessnessPattern↗︎︎; meaningfulness
What it fixates↗︎︎MeaningMeaninglessness
The sales pitchYou are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rulesYou don’t have to care!
Don’t get fooled again
Accurate understanding of meaningness↗︎︎ allows both freedom and purpose
Emotional appealCertainty; understanding; control. Reassurance that if you act in accordance with Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, everything will be well.Intelligence. Also, nothing means anything, so not getting what you want is not a problem.
Pattern of thinkingDeliberate stupidity; sentimentality; self-righteousnessContempt; rage; intellectualization; depression; anxietyJoyful realism
Likely next stancesMission↗︎︎Materialism↗︎︎
AccomplishmentUnify your self with Cosmic Plan↗︎︎Total apathyWizardry↗︎︎
How it causes sufferingAction based on imagined meanings fails; narrowed scope for action; Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ makes insane, harmful demandsHave to blind self to meaningfulness; undermines any practical action
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceDifficulty of blinding oneself to manifestations of nebulosity↗︎︎, and submitting to Cosmic Plan↗︎︎Difficulty of blinding self to manifestations of pattern↗︎︎, and abandoning all desiresUnappealing due to complexity and uncertainty
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsCuriosity; realism; intelligence; enjoyment of nebulosity↗︎︎, meaninglessness, un-knowingEnjoyment of pattern↗︎︎; recovery of passion
Intelligent aspectThere is meaning, and it is not merely subjective, so nihilism↗︎︎ is wrongThere are no inherent, objective, or eternal meanings, so eternalism↗︎︎ is wrong
Positive appropriation after resolutionRespect for pattern↗︎︎ is a compassionate aspect of realismRecognition of nebulosity↗︎︎ is a wisdom aspect of nihilism↗︎︎; nearly-correct understanding of defects of eternalism↗︎︎

Eternalism: the fixation of meaning

Kitschy romantic postcard image

Eternalism is the stance↗︎︎ that everything has a fixed↗︎︎, clear-cut meaning. That’s an attractive fantasy, but it inevitably runs into the reality that meaningness↗︎︎ is nebulous↗︎︎: variable, vague, and context-dependent. That collision can cause serious trouble.

This section provides tools for noticing when you have assumed the eternalist stance; for seeing how it is harmful; and for shifting into the complete stance↗︎︎ instead.

If you haven’t already read “Preview: eternalism and nihilism” in the book’s introduction, you may want to do that first.

Eternalism is wrong and harmful, yet appealing

It’s obvious that many things are meaningless, and most meanings are somewhat vague. In other words, we all know that eternalism is wrong. We’re only tempted to adopt↗︎︎ eternalism at times when meaninglessness or ambiguity is emotionally threatening. (See “Extreme examples” for a preview.)

Since it’s obviously wrong, I won’t argue against eternalism in detail. That would not be particularly helpful. We always already know it’s mistaken, and yet we fall into it anyway. (If you are committed↗︎︎ to an eternalist system, I send good wishes, and suggest that you won’t find this book to your taste.)

Even if you specifically reject eternalism, you will find that you adopt it at times, unwittingly. (Or I do, anyway!) This is particularly true for those who waver↗︎︎ in their relationship with eternalism. That includes agnostics, spiritual seekers, and miscellaneous “other”s who remain uncommitted to any stance.

Understanding why we are vulnerable to eternalism is the first step toward avoiding it. These emotional dynamics are independent of specific beliefs or commitments. I’ll start with a funny story about a time I got suckered by eternalism. Then I’ll explain more generally its emotional appeal.

Then I’ll point out ways it fails to deliver on its emotional promises, and causes harm and suffering. This can be hard to accept, because eternalism seems to offer hope, solace, purpose, ethical certainty, and all manner of other desirable meaning-goods. It promises control over your life—but cannot deliver. Seeing through this deceptive game lets you escape playing it.

Eternalism depends on a series of ploys to make it seem plausible. These are tricks we play on ourselves, and each other, to avoid seeing eternalism’s failures. I will explain how to recognize and disarm each of these tactics.

This is (mostly) not about religion

Religions—especially fundamentalist ones—are the most obvious forms of eternalism. However, eternalism is more basic than religion, or any other system. It’s not about specific beliefs; it is a fundamental attitude to meaningness. It can show up unaccompanied by any conceptual system. It can show up in non-ideological popular attitudes to meaning—for example, in idealized conceptions of romance, illustrated at the top of this page.

So, although parts of my discussion of eternalism may sound similar to familiar criticisms of religion, it applies to atheists, skeptics, and rationalists too. We are not immune. Dropping religious beliefs is only a first step towards freeing ourselves from eternalism.

Political ideologies—especially extremist ones—insist on fixed meanings. So do various other systems, including some brands of rationalism, psychotherapy, scientism, and so on. The final part of this chapter discusses these non-theistic forms of eternalism.

I get duped by eternalism in a casino

Gambling addiction trades on the illusion that winning is meaningful

I’ll begin with a story about a time I fell under the spell of eternalism↗︎︎, with ridiculous results.

Then, I’ll draw some serious conclusions about the way eternalism works.

How I discovered The Ultimate Meaning Of Being

The point of gambling was lost on me.

I am not especially risk-averse. As a businessman, I often made decisions in which millions of dollars, and the survival of the enterprise, were at stake. Nowadays, I pursue outdoor sports in which death is a definite possibility.

On the other hand, I do not enjoy risk for its own sake. I see no point in taking risks unless the expected rewards are greater.

The puzzling thing about casino gambling is that it has “negative expected value.”↗︎︎ Over time, gamblers almost always lose more money than they make. In fact, the modern conceptual framework for “rational action”↗︎︎ was invented to explain why gambling is a bad idea. So what’s the point?

A decade ago, I started passing through Reno airport regularly, and sometimes spent the night in hotels there. They all have enormous casinos on the ground floor, laid out so that you cannot avoid walking past innumerable flashing, blooping slot machines on the way to your room.

Being curious about human motivations, I used to watch the gamblers, trying to figure out what they were feeling↗︎︎.

I had some guesses; but I thought I ought to try betting, to see if I could experience the same thing. My guess was that I couldn’t. It seemed likely that gamblers gambled because they were stupid, or did not understand negative expectation value, or had some sort of superstitious belief that they were special↗︎︎, so randomness did not apply. I couldn’t adopt their wrong beliefs, so I wouldn’t be able to have the experience they did.

I had also heard it said that you can only understand gambling by wagering a sum large enough that losing it would be a serious problem for you. I wanted to understand, but not that badly.

Applying rational decision theory, I resolved to obtain as much information as I could at the least possible expected cost. (That strategy is automatic for me.) I looked for the lowest-stakes slot machine, and found one that would let me bet a single cent on each round.

So I fed it a dollar—the least it would accept—and pulled the handle. I immediately won five cents. And ten cents on the next try! Then several losses in a row.

I upped my bet from one to five cents—and won again.

As I consistently won more than I lost, I was gradually suffused with a warm glow. I felt safe and at home in the world. What a blessed relief!

I realized that the universe loved me, and that everything was going to come out well after all. My ever-present nagging sense of vague wrongness disappeared, and I recognized that it had always been a misunderstanding. Everything is as it should be; everything is connected; everything makes sense; everything is benevolently watched over by the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.

This was eternalism↗︎︎ straight-up, purely at a bodily, felt level.

I’m disposed to nihilism↗︎︎; so, at the same time, I was running a sardonic mental commentary. The cognitive dissonance between feeling unquestioned confidence in the All-Good Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, and my intellectual confidence that casino operators ensure that their slot machines are a losing bet, was extremely funny. That humorousness fed back into my bodily enjoyment.

It didn’t take long to conclude that I had gained all the knowledge I had asked for, and far more. The universe, in its infinite generosity, had gifted me with profound insight. To finish the charade, I increased my bet to 25 cents, and then 50 cents.

I walked back toward my hotel room grinning like the village idiot, unspeakably happy.

As I entered the elevator, a sexy lady jumped in with me.

“Lucky night?” she asked.

(It dawned on me only as I was writing this that she was a professional. I’m kind of clueless about such things. A guy in a suit, leaving a casino floor accompanied only by a gigantic grin, is surely a fine business opportunity.)

“No!” I exclaimed, beaming. “At one point I was up by thirty-seven cents, but in the end I lost the whole dollar!”

Her face closed; she turned away, and wouldn’t look at me for the rest of the elevator ride.

There’s something wrong with anyone who’s that excited about thirty-seven cents.

Eternalism is an addiction

Actually, winning thirty-seven cents was not going to make a such a big difference in my life.

Discovering universal love would. That was a really great feeling. Experiencing that all the time—the way some mystics supposedly do—would be fabulous.

That sense of safety, understanding, and certainty could be addictive. I think that’s part of why we all frequently fall into the eternalist stance↗︎︎—even when we know better.

Eternalism feels right—absolutely right. And when we lose it, we’ll do almost anything to get it back. We’ll pretend not to see obvious randomness, and take up arms to destroy evidence of it.

Eternalism and patternicity

Patternicity↗︎︎1 is the brain’s built-in tendency to perceive patterns↗︎︎ that don’t exist. An example is the experience of seeing a face in the light and dark patches on a rock, or splotch of paint, or piece of toast. It’s often impossible to not-see them, even when you are undeceived, and know perfectly well there’s no face there.

Eternalism is patternicity for broad dimensions of meaning—purpose, value, ethics—rather than physical objects. Our brains seem to have evolved to find patterns of meaning, too. In the casino, the intellectual understanding that my feelings were ridiculous did not make them any less profound. Runs of unexpected good or bad luck trigger the eternalist stance automatically.

Meaningness is not merely subjective

Some claim that meanings are merely subjective: matters of personal opinion, or at most cultural conventions. Unfortunately, this slides rapidly into nihilism. Fortunately, meanings are not merely subjective. I will explain both this in detail later in the book, but:

If meaningness was merely subjective, it would not be possible to be wrong about it. However, my felt beliefs about meaning, in the grip of a run of good luck, were definitely outright wrong.

Eternalism and dopamine

The joy of winning, patternicity, addiction, mania, and religion are all connected by the neurotransmitter dopamine.2 Dopamine plays a key role in motivation and reward. It spikes in response to unexpected success, and is experienced as pleasurable and energizing.

Dopamine reinforces your discovery of a valuable connection, with a new practical understanding of the world. It’s your brain telling you you finally got things right, for once—so pay attention, remember this, and do it again!

Random gambling wins are unexpected, and therefore cause dopamine release. Unfortunately, that increases patternicity, because the brain treats dopamine as evidence of insight. Gamblers typically believe in “luck” as something that comes and goes, and “streaks” of wins or losses that they can detect. When “on a winning streak,” they expect it to continue; but they also believe a losing streak must be balanced by future winnings. Either way, perceptions of non-existent patterns keep them playing.

Stimulant drugs, such as nicotine, cocaine, and speed, raise dopamine levels, mimicking the reward effect of unexpected success. Stimulant addiction and gambling addiction are, therefore, believed to work in much the same way.

Mania—the “up” phase of manic depression—is similar to an cocaine high, and may also be dopamine-mediated.3,4

Hyper-religiosity is common in mania. The manic feels full of cosmic realization, spiritual vision, confidence, and charisma. Many religious leaders probably experience stable hypomania↗︎︎—the only mildly-delusional form that doesn’t interfere much with life.

Eternalism straight-up

Eternalism is most obvious in systems↗︎︎ that reinforce it with concepts. For example, Christianity reinforces eternalism with beliefs about God, who makes everything meaningful.

My slot-machine experience was eternalism straight-up, with no conceptual framework. God was not in the picture, because I’m a life-long atheist, and thirty-seven cents was not enough to change my mind about Him. Probably if I had believed in God, my mental commentary would have been about my relationship with Him, though.

Instead, I had just a vague feeling about my relationship with the Non-Me. When I say I felt that “the universe loves me,” this did not involve any concept of “the universe” as a thing; rather, a vague omnidirectional feeling of being loved.

Eternalism and systems

It’s easy to see how experiences similar to mine in the casino (but more intense or frequent) can grow into eternalist systems. Put a name on the feeling, make up some theories about it, and you’ve founded a religion, self-help movement, or alternative therapy. Your vague certainty that everything now makes sense justifies your metaphysical speculations.

Established eternalist systems can also co-opt such experiences, and use them to reinforce their conceptual dogmas. Whenever someone feels something like I did, the system’s representative can say “Yes! You got it! That was God’s love / psychological integration / enlightenment / healing energy / etc.

And when, inevitably, it dissipates, he or she will tell you what you need to do to get it back. Eternalist systems relentlessly exploit this addictive dynamic.

Critics of eternalist systems usually attack their beliefs. False beliefs are mostly not what make eternalism compelling, though—it’s the emotional dynamics. Addiction is only one of those.

To free yourself, or others, from eternalism, addressing the emotional dynamics is even more important than refuting concepts.

Eternalism makes you miserable

Unfortunately, we can’t experience unexpected success very often; we’d come to expect it. Trying to prolong the dopamine high usually makes you miserable instead.

Gamblers almost all lose money in the long run. Coming off of cocaine is depressing. Then it takes bigger and bigger doses to get you equally high, with increasingly nasty side-effects. Mania ends in crippling depression.

Eternalism also always lets you down. It seems to offer hope and solace, but in the end it always runs into the brick wall of reality. Then, when it’s impossible to ignore nebulosity↗︎︎, you feel abandoned by the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎. That’s the profoundest possible betrayal.

Even nihilism↗︎︎ feels better at such times.

And so, automatically, we swing back and forth between the two.

  • 1. More formally, patternicity is called “apophenia↗︎︎.”
  • 2. This is according to current neuroscience, which is always subject to revision. I think the connection between gambling, patternicity, addiction, mania, and eternalism holds regardless of the mechanism.
  • 3. The science of this isn’t yet clear, as of 2013. Other neurotransmitters are also involved.
  • 4. Depression is closely connected with nihilism, just as hypomania is connected with eternalism. Depressives experience below-average patternicity, and diminished pleasure and motivation from unexpected successes.

No cosmic plan

Galaxy

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Deep down in our hearts, we all know that the universe has a plan. There is something—maybe not God, but some sort of cosmic consciousness or highest principle—that is the ultimate source of meaning. We know there is more to life than the mundane rat race, and that in the end nothing can really be random. We must have a true calling, a reason we were put here on earth. That is our part to play in the grand plan. When we find it and embrace it, everything falls into place and we discover profound inner peace. Acting in accordance with our proper role gives life an extraordinary appeal, the wonderful feeling that we are in sync with reality and fulfilling the promise of something transcendent. Resisting this deep purpose causes only pain, struggle, and heartache.

I hope you are feeling slightly nauseous now. This is an inspiring vision. It is also utterly, disastrously wrong.

Not only is there no God to order the universe, there is no other eternal↗︎︎, transcendent principle or force that provides meaning to the world and to our lives. The universe and everything in it are “nebulous↗︎︎,” meaning that nothing can be permanent, external, or unambiguously defined.

We cling to the idea that there must be a cosmic plan because we fear that without one everything would be meaningless. But this is mistaken; which means that most ideas about meaningfulness and meaninglessness are mistaken. Fortunately, life is meaningful without any cosmic plan or ultimate source of meaning.

The appeal of eternalism

Smarmy guy

Eternalism↗︎︎ is the most attractive of all stances↗︎︎.1 It’s simple and easy to understand. It promises everything you could want from meaning: certainty, safety, understanding, and control. It offers solid ground; a foundation on which you can build a meaningful life.

Eternalism guarantees that everything is under control, meaningness↗︎︎-wise. Meanings are clear and fixed↗︎︎; they won’t slide out from under you. Ethics won’t change with fashion; your purpose in life won’t suddenly become pointless; you are not going turn into someone other than the person you truly are and have always been.

If you play your part in the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, everything will be well. You are guaranteed a good outcome if you follow the rules. Even when your life seems to be a chaotic disaster, even when you doubt whether it means anything—even then, it is all part of the Cosmic Plan, and there is nothing to worry about. Conflict and uncertainty, all sorts of messiness about meaning—these are only illusions.

  • 1. Eternalism seems also to be the most biologically natural stance. Something like it is automatic; our brains just go there by default. See the discussions of patternicity earlier, and magical thinking later. More precisely, the innate human worldview is probably animism↗︎︎, which is not quite eternalistic. Animism makes everything meaningful, but does not make explicit that everything is meaningful—which is part of my understanding of eternalism.

The promise of certainty

Certainty: the mythical holy grail

What we want most from meaning is guarantees.

Life is nebulous↗︎︎: chaotic, risky, and confusing. Efforts that should work fail. The good suffer and wrong-doers prosper. The world does not make sense. Each of us is torn by uncertainties, conflicting desires, and impossible decisions.

We want assurance that this is all just an illusion. We want to hear that the real↗︎︎ world is—somehow—orderly and consistently meaningful. We want answers—sometimes desperately.

Eternalism↗︎︎ promises to deliver those answers, and to guarantee them. It cannot; and so it lies.

Eternalism pretends to offer certainty. It pretends that behind apparent chaos, there is a perfect pattern↗︎︎ that explains everything. It pretends to end all doubt, and the suffering, confusion, and anxiety that comes with it.

Eternalism can be exhilarating! It cannot deliver accurate answers, but it can deliver a feeling of certainty—temporarily. You adopt↗︎︎ the eternalist stance↗︎︎ by blinding yourself to nebulosity↗︎︎; by pretending not to see contradictions.

It’s a huge relief, an occasion of joy, to set aside all doubts. Adopting eternalism frees all the energy that was tied up by internal divisions; power struggles within the self.1 Certainty about life-purpose and ethics ends confusion about what to do and how to live; full of confidence, you can make rapid progress in life.

Eternalism is now typically packaged in systems↗︎︎. Sometimes raw eternalism can provide certainty without specifics—as in my casino experience. Usually, though, we need a web of justifications, of canned answers, to not-see nebulosity. That’s what ideologies—religions, political theories, secular cults—provide. These justifications frequently fail, when nebulosity contradicts them.

When the fantasy of absolute answers is threatened by evidence, eternalism responds with various psychological ploys. These include, for instance, suppressing dissenting thoughts, physically removing yourself from contradictory situations, kitschy sentimentality, blind faith, mystification, and arming yourself against perception.

Eternalism is at its most glorious in a conversion experience, during the honeymoon after you have first committed↗︎︎ to a system. That can last for a few weeks to a few years; for as long as you can silence your internal voices of doubt. Eventually it becomes impossible to not-see the evidence against the system. You may remain committed, but it can only be a wavering↗︎︎ commitment. The honeymoon turns into a warm memory, cherished on Sunday mornings but increasingly distant from everyday experience.

Alternatively, seeking renewed certainty, you may search for a new system. Some people become serial conversion junkies. But as with opiate addiction, it becomes harder and harder to recreate the first high. And the periods of doubt between commitments, like heroin withdrawal, turn increasingly into nihilistic anxiety and despair. This pattern was particularly common in the California Bay Area in the late 20th century. It afflicted many of my friends, and that was my initial motivation to write this book. Since I started writing, more than a decade ago, new patterns have emerged—but they are no less dysfunctional.

In the 21st century West, there are hundreds of competing eternalist systems. Although they all have the same fundamental stance↗︎︎ toward meaning, and the same emotional dynamics, they disagree sharply about specifics. This adds to the chaos and confusion that eternalism tries to dispel. Further, there is widespread understanding that none of the systems can provide certainty. The search for the One True System no longer seems credible.

In fact, the kinds of answers we want cannot be had, anywhere. Accepting this fact may lead to nihilism↗︎︎, the denial↗︎︎ of all meaning. That is a bad outcome—but not a necessary one.

The complete stance↗︎︎ recognizes that certainty is impossible, but that meaning is real. If we set aside the futile hope for absolute answers, we can find patterns↗︎︎ of meaning that are usually good enough to navigate our lives. No ultimate↗︎︎, perfectly reliable foundation for morality or purpose is possible—but we do regularly solve problems of ethics and direction; and therefore we can!

  • 1. Kramer and Alstad’s The Guru Papers provides a penetrating analysis of the joy of eternalist self-blinding, particularly in the case of American pop religion, but also in eternalist political systems such as Communism.

The illusion of understanding

Can opener

Total understanding—the feeling that everything makes sense—is one of the most seductive promises of eternalism↗︎︎. The feeling is wonderful, but unfortunately the understanding is illusory.

Recent research shows how illusions of understanding arise, what their effects are, and how they can be dispelled. Most concretely, this includes studies of illusory understanding of everyday physical causality: common natural phenomena and household devices. That isn’t directly relevant to Meaningness. However, the same patterns of illusory understanding also apply to issues of meaningness↗︎︎, such as ethics and politics.

Understanding and explanation

Certainty, understanding, and control are closely linked promises of eternalism.1 If you are certain an explanation is correct, you have a stronger feeling of understanding. If you have an explanation for why something means something, it increases your certainty that it does mean that. If you understand something, you feel that you can control it. Psychology experiments show that people feel they can control events they definitely can’t, so long as they understand them.

Personal accounts of conversion to communism—an eternalist political ideology—provide fine examples of the emotional power of illusory understanding. Conversion brings newfound optimism, joy, insight, and all-encompassing comprehension.

The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern↗︎︎ like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past—a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know.2

After all, every minute aspect of daily life is caught up in systems of material production, and therefore can be subjected to Marxist analysis. Waiting at the bus stop, the scheduled times for three buses go by, and then two appear all at once. Why? Because of capitalist exploitation. Everything is because of capitalist exploitation.

(Exercises for the reader: (1) Figure out why capitalist exploitation explains this common pattern of bus arrivals. (2) Figure out a better, non-Marxist explanation.3)

Marxism, like Catholicism, is an extremely well-worked-out system↗︎︎. Countless brilliant intellectuals, working for centuries, have already figured out explanations for everything. Well, almost everything. If you are willing to swallow a few camels, Jesuits will strain out all the gnats for you. In other words, if you accept a few giant absurdities, they can give coherent, logical explanations for all details.

Newer, less-elaborated ideologies—UFO cults, for example—may provide a strong, if vague, feeling of understanding. However, they have few explanations to back that up. This is one reason they mostly only work as closed subcultures. If you are a communist or Catholic, you can talk to outsiders without your belief system collapsing, because you have answers to their objections.

Illusions of understanding: everyday causality

Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, in an influential 2002 paper↗︎︎, showed that people believe they understand familiar manufactured objects (such as can openers) and natural phenomena (such as tides) much better than they actually do. The researchers had subjects rate their understanding of various objects and phenomena, and then asked them to give an explanation. After that, the subjects rated their own understanding again. Their second ratings were much lower. Most subjects were surprised to find, after trying and failing to explain, that they understood much less than they had thought.

You might like to try this before reading on. On a scale of 1 to 7, how well do you think you understand a can opener? 1 would mean you know what it is for, but have basically no idea how it works. 7 means you know everything that anyone would know, short of being a can opener designer.

Now, explain how a can opener works. You could write this out in words, or draw a can opener from memory. Label the parts with what they do. (No fair looking at the picture at the head of this page! And for a fair trial, you need to do this on paper or screen; as we’ll see, it’s almost impossible not to cheat if you do it in your head.)

When you are done: has your estimate of your depth of understanding changed?

Now go look at an actual can opener, and at least put it up against a can as if you were about to open it. Turn the handle and watch how the mechanism moves. Then re-rate your written understanding. And how well do you think you understand now, after examining the reality?

I did this after reading the Rozenblit paper, and was surprised to find that my explanation had some details wrong, and significant missing parts. I also discovered, after playing with two ordinary manual crank-turning can openers, that they worked on completely different principles. I’ve used both types a million times, and never noticed this, because you use them exactly the same way. My rating of my original understanding went from 6 to 3. I’m estimating my new understanding at 6, but I’m worried I’m still overconfident!

It turns out that for most everyday objects, we have some vague mental image, but not an actual causal understanding. Here’s the Rozenblit paper:

Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do. … [They] wrongly attribute far too much fidelity and detail to their mental representations because the sparse renderings do have some efficacy and do provide a rush of insight.

(“A rush of insight”… Remind you of something? A spectre haunting Europe, perhaps?)

We think we understand a can opener because we can play a mental movie of using one. That feels as though it is almost as good as actually watching. But:

The mental movie is much more like Hollywood than it is like real life—it fails to respect reality constraints. When we try to lean on the seductively glossy surface we find the façades of our mental films are hollow card-board. That discovery, the revelation of the shallowness of our mental representations for perceptually salient processes, may be what causes the surprise in our participants.

Unless you are a kitchen tool engineer, there’s no reason to actually understand how a can opener works. What everyone else needs is to know (1) what it is for and (2) how to use it. So most of the time “understanding” is really “comfort with.” It means you know how to interact with it well enough to get by, and you are reassured that it is not going to explode without warning. This comfort is provided mainly by familiarity, not understanding. Having used a can opener many times convinces you that you understand it, because you can almost always make one work, and you almost never cut yourself. Tellingly, Rozenblit and Keil found that their subjects did not overestimate their “how-to” knowledge, only their “how-it-works” knowledge.4

Learning how things work is usually a waste of time, from an evolutionary perspective. And total understanding is never even possible. The “illusion of explanatory depth” may have evolved to tell us when to stop:

We have to learn to use much sparser representations of causal relations that are good enough to give us the necessary insights: insights that go beyond associative similarity but which at the same time are not overwhelming in terms of cognitive load. It may therefore be quite adaptive to have the illusion that we know more than we do so that we settle for what is enough. The illusion might be an essential governor on our drive to search for explanatory underpinnings; it terminates potentially inexhaustible searches for ever-deeper understanding by satiating the drive for more knowledge once some skeletal level of causal comprehension is reached.

This doesn’t always work right; our brains’ guesses about when to stop can go wrong. Education theorists find that students often stop trying to understand too soon, when they merely feel “familiar” with the material↗︎︎, because the modern classroom demands a depth of understanding beyond what would have been useful to our ancestors. Conversely, my interest in Precambrian evolution↗︎︎ is probably a pathological result of mild autism—a brain abnormality.

If you look closely at a can opener in operation, you can see immediately how it works. Then you forget as soon as you look away. Knowing that you could figure out how something works, whenever you need to, is a good reason not to bother until then—and not to remember afterward. Rozenblit and Keil hypothesized that our brains confuse vague visual memory with understanding, and that this was the source of the illusion they found.

This was confirmed in Rebecca Lawson’s study of people’s understanding of bicycles↗︎︎. She found that most people have no clue what a bicycle looks like, much less how one works, even if they own one. (I know that sounds implausible; the results in the paper are dramatic.) We all have a memory of seeing a bicycle, and on that basis think we know what one looks like—but few people can draw something that’s even approximately similar. The bicycle-like things they do draw could not possibly work.

You might like to try this before reading on. Don’t bother being artistic; the picture can just show how the main parts (handlebars, frame, seat, pedals, chain, wheels) attach to each other.

Lawson found that people can easily understand how a bicycle works, and draw one accurately, if there’s one in front of them. She writes:

We may be using the world as an “outside memory” to save us from having to store huge amounts of information. Since much of the information that we need in everyday life can be found simply by moving our eyes, we do not need to store it and then retrieve it from memory.

(This point will be important, by the way, in my explanations for how meaning works, much later in this book.)

Here’s a bicycle drawn by someone who rides one most days:

Bicycle drawing

This “bicycle” couldn’t turn, because the front wheel is connected to frame struts that form two sides of a rigid quadrilateral. Mistakenly, it has the chain going around the front wheel as well as the back one, which also would make turning impossible (among other problems, with gearing for instance).

Perceptual understanding isn’t possible for all devices—for example if they have hidden parts, or are very complicated, or run on invisible forces such as electricity.5

So what about meaning, which is also invisible?

Illusions of understanding: ethics

Most people think they understand ethics reasonably well. However, their ethical explanations often don’t make sense; they depend on weird assumptions, use dream logic, or skip over major issues. My story “The puzzle of meaningness” includes some humorous examples. Our feeling of understanding ethics is largely illusory; we don’t notice that our own ethical explanations are incoherent.

The following question is a classic of moral psychology research:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.”6 So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

You might like to write out your own brief explanation before reading on.

This exercise may seem risky or embarrassing. A feeling of moral competence is often close to the heart of one’s sense of self. However, most experts say there is no right or wrong answer, although there are interestingly different kinds of answers.

It might also help to know that even professional theologians and moral philosophers are often unable to give coherent ethical explanations. Despite fancy footwork, theological answers boil down to “because that’s what God wants,” with no clear reason He wants that. Secular academic theories of ethics are all known to be wrong. Moral philosophers must support some theory, arguing “this is less bad than the others,” but most admit that their professional expertise is rarely useful when dealing with everyday ethical problems. Evidently, professional ethicists are afflicted with a powerful illusion of explanatory depth.

Why do people think they mostly understand ethics, if they can’t explain it coherently? As with can openers, we know what it is for, and we know how to use it well enough to get by. The feeling of understanding is an illusion based on familiarity and comfort. We know through experience that we can navigate ethical issues reasonably reliably, and they are not going to suddenly explode. As with devices, this is adequate for most people most of the time.

Ethics sometimes does explode on you—for example, if you are caught having an affair. It’s not just that there will be bad consequences; there will be many difficult choices and judgements in sorting out the mess, and the inadequacy of your ethical understanding may become obvious. Sometimes such crises lead to psychological growth, including developing a more sophisticated ethical understanding.

Research in moral psychology has found that people’s ethical understanding passes through a predictable series of stages. The stages are defined not in terms of what people consider right or wrong, but what sorts of explanations they use to justify those judgements. The Heinz story was invented by Lawrence Kohlberg as a way of eliciting such explanations. He assigned them to six stages of moral development↗︎︎. There are some problems with Kohlberg’s theory—mainly, it is too rationalistic—but the conclusion that people advance from lesser to greater ethical understanding seems correct, and important.

Disquietingly, research has found that most adults get stuck somewhere in the middle of the developmental sequence. The illusion of ethical understanding is one reason they may not progress. As with bicycles, if you think you know how ethics works, and can use it well enough most of the time, there seems no reason to try to understand better.

Robert Kegan has extended and improved↗︎︎ Kohlberg’s framework. He describes an ethical equivalent to Rozenblit and Keil’s discovery that attempting to explain things can reveal one’s own lack of understanding. The illusion of understanding sometimes dissolves when you have to give an ethical explanation.

Realizing your explanations are inadequate opens the possibility of a forward ethical stage transition. This happens only rarely, however. One reason is that it is easy to recognize that your understanding of a bicycle is wrong, by visually comparing your drawing with a real one. It is much harder to reality-test moral understanding, because ethics are far more nebulous↗︎︎ than bicycles.

Eternalism, by promoting a reassuring illusion of ethical understanding, hinders moral development. This is most obvious in religious fundamentalism, which denies the nebulosity of ethics, stranding you in a childish moral understanding. Rationalist eternalism typically fixates↗︎︎ some moral theory that is also obviously wrong, but does have some coherent systematic justification↗︎︎. These are adolescent rather than childish; utilitarianism is a common example.

Fortunately, eternalist ethical systems have become less credible, so it’s easier to advance to more sophisticated understandings. Unfortunately, “easier” is not “easy,” and ethical anxiety—a sense of being lost at sea when it comes to ethics—is increasingly prevalent. That is a major topic of the upcoming chapter on ethics.

Illusions of understanding: politics

Contemporary “politics” is mostly about polarized moral opinions.7 It is now considered normal, or even obligatory, for people to express vehement political opinions about issues they know nothing about, and which do not affect their life in any way. This is harmful and stupid.

Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding↗︎︎” (Fernbach et al., 2013) applies the Rozenblit method to political explanations. After subjects tried to explain how proposed political programs they supported would actually work, their confidence in them dropped. Subjects realized that their explanations were inadequate, and that they didn’t really understand the programs. This decreased their certainty that they would work. The subjects expressed more moderate opinions, and became less willing to make political donations in support of the programs, after discovering that they didn’t understand them as well as they had thought.

Fernbach et al. found that subjects’ opinions did not moderate when they were asked to explain why they supported their favored political programs. Other experiments have found this usually increases the extremeness of opinions, instead. Generating an explanation for why you support a program, rather than of how it would work, leads to retrieving or inventing justifications, which makes you more certain, not less. These political justifications usually rely on abstract values, appeals to authority, and general principles that require little specific knowledge of the issue. They are impossible to reality-test, and therefore easy to fool yourself with.

Extreme, ignorant political opinions are largely driven by eternalism. I find the Fernbach paper heartening, in showing that people can be shaken out of them. Arguing about politics almost never changes anyone’s mind; explaining, apparently, does.

This suggests a practice: when someone is ranting about a political proposal you disagree with, keep asking them “how would that part work?” Rather than raising objections, see if you can draw them into developing an ever-more-detailed causal explanation. If they succeed, they might change your mind! If not—they might change their own.

How does eternalism create illusions of understanding?

Eternalism promises to make everything make sense. It sometimes does deliver an illusion of universal understanding (as in the account of conversion to communism, above). Usually it can’t quite manage that, because almost all eternalism is wavering↗︎︎. The curtain that is supposed to conceal the illusionist is translucent. Most people realize they don’t understand everything. Still, eternalism does trick most people into believing they understand many things they don’t.

Somehow, we don’t notice that our explanations don’t make sense. How does eternalism manage that? I don’t have a complete answer, but I do have pieces of an answer. In fact, there is no one answer; eternalism has a big bag of tricks. The main part of this chapter describes a series of eternalist ploys: ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting that stabilize↗︎︎ the stance↗︎︎. All of these are tricks for deliberately not understanding meaningness↗︎︎.

The rest of this page discusses some other mechanisms that don’t fit into this “eternalist ploy” category.

Visualizing meaningness

Research like Lawson’s bicycle experiment shows that genuine understanding usually depends on perceptual support. It comes from exploring concrete examples by looking and poking. To some extent we can transfer that understanding by mental visualization; but as Rozenblit found, this is sketchy.

Direct perceptual support is generally impossible for meaningness (ethics, purpose, and so on). However, we do use mental images to help understand these issues too. Thinking about the Heinz story, I generated an image of his children watching their mother dying, for example. Likewise, when thinking about life purpose, we fantasize scenes of accomplishment, or imagine dying without having gotten anything much done.

These images are emotive, but probably mostly unrealistic and unhelpful. (The Heinz story didn’t even mention children, for example; maybe he didn’t have any!) I suspect eternalism leads us to take these mental movies much more seriously than they deserve. (How? I’m not sure.)

Mystical experiences of total understanding

People in non-ordinary states, produced by psychedelic drugs or meditation, often proclaim sudden, unshakable, universal understanding. They rarely or never can explain their supposed understanding. I think these are probably mostly illusory. Such experiences may give genuine but ineffable insight↗︎︎ into some things. I’m reasonably sure they involve no actual understanding↗︎︎ of most things.

Eternalist systems are often led by people who have such visions; but most of their adherents don’t. Ordinary↗︎︎ eternalists have to rely on the cosmic understanding of special↗︎︎ people.

Socially distributed (mis)understanding of meaning

Understanding of the physical world is socially distributed. You don’t need to understand how to build a bicycle frame, because there are people whose job that is, and you can rely on their understanding.

The same division of labor applies to understanding meaning.8 For instance, if you are Catholic, you know (or should know) that masturbation is a grave sin.9 Why?

You may remember the story of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground. You may also remember that the story is not about masturbation, but coitus interruptus. (That’s confusing.) You may recall that masturbation is a sin against chastity, and that the only proper use of the genitals is procreation. Or maybe also conjugal love. Why?

This is a pesky, impertinent question. You are (or should be) quite certain that you are correct, even if you can’t give a coherent explanation.

You don’t need to be able to give an explanation, because you know that if you go to a Jesuit, he will (or should)10 be able to explain in detail, with extensive logic, and answers to all objections. Your certainty can rest on your knowledge that an explanation is available, without having to know the details.

Although... for nearly everyone, it’s obvious that whatever explanation a priest gives for the evil of masturbation, it will be nonsense. It will be verbiage that sounds like explanation, but isn’t. Only loyalty to the eternalist system—the will to believe—could fool anyone into thinking it’s meaningful.

The same is true for most political opinions. Individuals are usually incapable of producing coherent explanations; but why should they?

You have heard experts on TV explaining Benghazi↗︎︎ and Keystone↗︎︎, and they seemed to make sense; and you know they are good and trustworthy and smart people, because they share your fundamental values. You might not be able to explain those issues in detail, but you are confident that they can. But perhaps those explanations are about as accurate as the priest’s?

Agreeing to agree about meanings

Because eternalist delusion is so desirable, people collude to maintain it. We all agree to agree—vociferously—to whatever meanings our social group comes up with. That is a genuinely compassionate activity. We all want to save each other from nihilism↗︎︎.

Agreeing violently about political opinions is a major social activity. Groups of friends get together and regurgitate political explanations they’ve heard on TV or read on the web. This reinforces certainty and the illusion of understanding.

Talent for regurgitation gives you social prestige; people think it’s an important life skill. Imagine—if you got good enough at it, you could go on TV and vomit opinions in front of millions of people! Mostly, though, this is a collaborative, improvisatory, small-group activity.

Similarly, ethical explanation is mainly a social activity. Moral philosophers want ethics to be about rational individual decision-making, but it mostly isn’t. (This is one reason academic ethics is so useless.)

Research↗︎︎ by Jonathan Haidt and others shows that ethical explanations are mostly used to justify↗︎︎ actions we have taken or want to take. This “social intuitionism” is a descriptive theory, about how ethics works in practice. It’s not a good account (even according to Haidt) of how ethics ought to work.

In the ethics chapter, I’ll ask “what is ethics for?” if not social justification, and not rational individual decision-making. I’ll argue that genuine understanding is genuinely valuable.

  • 1. Nevertheless, certainty, understanding, and control all seem to be separate innate psychological drives. We seek certainty, even when understanding is entirely unavailable. We seek understanding, even when control is obviously impossible. Personally, I love understanding things like supernovas and Precambrian evolution, even though there’s nothing I can do with them.
  • 2. The God That Failed↗︎︎ is a famous collection of accounts by Western intellectuals explaining why they converted to communism and later became disenchanted. I’m relying here on the summary in Baumeister’s Meanings of Life↗︎︎, p. 299. The quote is from Arthur Koestler, p. 23 in The God That Failed according to Baumeister; italics in original.
  • 3. This is called “bus bunching”; the Wikipedia has a fascinating explanation↗︎︎. The dynamical chaos theory used there is also important in my explanation↗︎︎ of how meaning works.
  • 4. This result is actually a bit surprising, because the psychological literature generally finds that most people are overconfident about most things↗︎︎. Rozenblit and Keil did find overconfidence effects for some other types of knowledge, such as geography, but overconfidence about causality was much larger.
  • 5. Rozenblit and Keil found preliminary evidence that subjects were less likely to overestimate their understanding in these cases. I don’t know whether this has been confirmed by subsequent studies.
  • 6. If you know the least bit about drug development, this story will seem absurdly unrealistic. That annoys me. Maybe this absurdity is not relevant to the essential ethical dilemma, which you are supposed to somehow abstract from the details. However, I worry that unrealistic scenarios—the famous “trolley problems↗︎︎” are another example—give misleading results. In fact, I suspect artificial “thought experiments,” even if they weren’t obviously silly, may be worse than useless for understanding ethics. I’ll suggest later that observation of real-life ethical deliberation and action in “ecologically valid conditions” is needed instead.
  • 7. I’ll analyze this important, unfortunate development repeatedly, at various points later in the book.
  • 8. This will be central in my eventual explanation for how meaningness works. Interestingly (to me), my PhD thesis—titled Vision, Instruction, and Action↗︎︎—is also about perceptual understanding during improvised activity, and socially distributed understanding (communicated through over-the-shoulder instructions) of that activity.
  • 9. See Catechism 2396↗︎︎ if you are in doubt.
  • 10. Disastrously, some priests↗︎︎ have gotten wobbly on masturbation, and are leading millions into damnation.

The fantasy of control

I want a remote control for my life
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Bruno Souza Leão

If only you could get control over your life. If only things went according to plan. If only people did what they’re supposed to.

None of that is going to happen. Reality is often chaotic. Things fall apart, break down, slip away, blow up in your face—metaphorically, or for real.

The physical world, the social world, our selves, and meanings: all are nebulous↗︎︎—intangible, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous. This makes complete control impossible.

Eternalism↗︎︎ denies↗︎︎ nebulosity. It hints that you can get control over your life—if you just make it conform to the proper patterns↗︎︎. This fantasy is one of eternalism’s strongest selling points—and most harmful lies.

Pursuing that fantasy has predictable bad results. Attempts to exert partial influence are often sensible and successful; attempts to gain complete control are dopey and disastrous.

Control is a major topic that shows up in many parts of this book. Besides eternalism, it is central for two dimensions of meaning, capability and contingency. It’s also significant in dualism↗︎︎, and plays a major role in confusions about the self, ethics, authority, and sacredness. This page is an introductory overview.

Control is closely connected with certainty and understanding, covered in the previous two pages. You may find it helpful to read those, if you haven’t already.

Nebulosity makes complete control impossible

Plane with cloud-seeding gun
Plane with cloud-zapping↗︎︎ gun. (CC)↗︎︎ Christian Jansky

“Nebulosity”—cloud-like-ness—is the impossibility of completely grasping anything. If we could just get a handle on things, we could force them to behave. But, to varying degrees, we never can.

This applies to the physical world, just as it does to the psychological, social, and meaning worlds. It is never possible to get perfect control even over a simple mechanical device. I’ll give technical explanations for this later, in discussions of dynamical chaos↗︎︎ and the objective inseparability of objects. A simple way to see it, though: your device could always get hit by meteor, at any time, and then it will stop doing what you want. This is very unlikely, but shows that the world is never perfectly predictable.

Most activities involve other people, who are notoriously difficult to control. Even the most powerful tyrant cannot entirely manage it. Worse, perhaps, you cannot always control even yourself. Sometimes you find yourself doing things you hadn’t intended, and will probably regret later, because it’s what you want at the time. And, even when events go according to plan, their meanings may squirm out from under you. The outcome you so desired may be, objectively, just as you wanted it—and yet it no longer seems significant, as it did when you began. (I’ll say more about each of these types of failure of control later on this page.)

Overall, nebulosity often seems the main obstacle to control,1 and pattern↗︎︎ the main resource. Nebulosity, therefore, often becomes the hated enemy. Eternalism promises to make nebulosity go away by fixating↗︎︎ patterns, making complete control possible. Of course, it cannot.

Fortunately, nebulosity is not actually a hostile force. It delivers unexpected opportunities, and surprising good outcomes as well as bad ones. Learning to appreciate nebulosity is an important way out of eternalism and into the complete stance↗︎︎.

Pattern makes interaction possible

In the ideal situation of perfect control, you could make anything you want happen simply by choosing it. You would be unconstrained—causally unaffected—by the outside world. Control would flow only outward from you toward the world. The locus of control↗︎︎ would be purely internal to you.

In the opposite extreme, you would be entirely controlled by the world, and any choices you might make would be meaningless. The locus of control would be entirely external, and causality would flow only inward, from the world acting on you.

Neither of these extremes occurs in reality. Ultimately, this is a fact of physics; causality is always distributed, and one thing cannot affect another without also being affected by it to some extent.2 However, it’s also obvious in everyday life, so long as you look without forcing an extreme internalist or externalist view.

Locus of control, in other words, is always nebulous: partial, shifting, uncertain, ambiguous. This is partly because the self/other boundary is itself nebulous; it’s often unclear what is “me” and what is “that.” Partly self and other are nebulous because locus of control is nebulous; these are, in part, two ways of saying the same thing. (This is a key aspect of my analysis of what “self” means.)

Because “control” is often understood as “complete control,” an alternate vocabulary may be useful. One might speak of “influence,” meaning partial control, for example. This is somewhat misleading, though, by suggesting that you are active and the world is passive (although passive-aggressive: it doesn’t always do what you tell it).

I prefer the word interaction: it suggests that both you and the world are actively participating in determining what happens.3 “Interaction” covers causality shared with both the non-human world and with other people.

Improvisation is characteristic of interaction. Because the world is nebulous, you can’t plan in advance everything you are going to do. You always have to figure some actions out as you go along. Usually, when the time comes, it’s obvious what you need to do, although you could not have foreseen it.

Collaboration is the most important form of interaction.4 Most human activities involve other people. Human interactions may be hostile; not all are collaborations. But collaborations are the most valuable, and most interesting (to me at least).

Practical activity is a spontaneous partner dance. You are continually responsive to the details of your unfolding situation, as revealed by perception. It is futile to try to force interactions to conform to a preconceived idea of how things should go.

Fukushima nuclear reactor on fire
Fukushima nuclear reactor on fire. (CC)↗︎︎ Digital Globe

“Control” sometimes has negative connotations, and “collaboration” positive ones. However, my point is not moral or political. The issue here is not that control is not nice, it’s that complete control is physically impossible.

So long as you recognize that nebulosity is inevitable, there is nothing necessarily wrong with seeking partial control. Sometimes it’s even ethically imperative to get as much control as possible; for example in designing and operating a nuclear power plant.5

The psychology of control confusions

The rest of this page covers specific confused attitudes to control:

Illusions of control

In many situations, it is difficult or impossible to know how much control you have. You have to guess, based on understanding and experience. Extensive psychological research↗︎︎6 has shown that most people overestimate how much control they have—or could get—most of the time. This has several objectively harmful effects.

If you believe you have more control than you do, you are likely to take larger risks than you should. Experiments (and everyday experience) show that overconfidence leads to gambling-like behavior. It accounts for a lot of stupid accidents and bad life-decisions.

Overconfidence that you can eventually get control (through practice, or by applying bigger hammers) can make you waste time and resources trying to control the uncontrollable. Combined with the sunk cost fallacy↗︎︎, this can lead to applying ever increasing resources to an unworkable strategy. Believing that control must always be possible makes it difficult to learn from failure. Each disaster looks like a mere temporary setback, and you may take it as evidence that even more violent effort is called for.

Eternalism can make anything less than complete control emotionally unacceptable. Letting go, and accepting partial control, may seem too threatening. Then you may pursue control for its own sake, even when it has no objective benefit, or when the costs of maintaining control are obviously too high.

Control is only ever partial; but eternalistic hope for complete control can lead to over-controlling. That is the counter-productive application of extra force, complexity, or rigidity, when those actually result in less control, not more; or when the cost of increasing control outweighs its benefits.

Since it is pattern that makes partial control possible, over-control often attempts to impose a pattern by brute force. The pattern may be a real one that just doesn’t fit the situation (you are not actually that person’s best friend, so they aren’t going to do that task for you); or it may be an entirely imaginary one (you can’t actually find a cure for your retinopathy using tarot cards). Eternalism often leads to inventing spurious patterns that would grant control, and clinging to them even when there’s strong evidence against them, if that would mean loss of the illusion of control.7

A strong emotional need for control may lead you to refuse to deal with parts of reality that you can’t control to your satisfaction. Some people organize their lives to avoid most social interactions, or responsibility for anything mechanical, or dealing with money—as much as possible. Abandoning the possibility of incomplete control can have a high cost, drastically narrowing the scope of your life.8

One common response to nebulosity is excessive, obsessive planning: trying to figure out everything that could go wrong, and what you’d do if it did. Sometimes this is wise, but when you don’t fully understand the pattern, planning may be impossible. Over-control and planning also blind you to serendipity and unexpected opportunities.

Often it is better to observe the actual pattern, and to intervene minimally in its flow as events unfold. This skillful improvisation—often coupled with collaboration—can redirect existing forces in the direction you want.9 Such interaction doesn’t provide complete control, but may give better results. It also allows you to change course when new positive possibilities open.

Breakdown

Eternalism promises complete control, but cannot deliver. How to sustain the illusion, when non-control becomes obvious?

The first response is to invent an excuse. Eternalism explains away each failure as a one-off special situation that does not predict future lack of control.

The excuses given by American government agencies and multinational CEOs are essentially the same as those of African witchdoctors and of drug addicts everywhere. This is highly amusing once you notice the pattern.

No one ever says “We mostly don’t understand what is going on; the effects of our actions are inherently unpredictable; and our motivations are mixed, so we often undermine our own effectiveness.” (Even though that’s always the truth for everyone and every organization.) Instead:

  • Adverse global economic conditions
  • Sudden ripening of negative karma from a previous life
  • It’s society’s fault
  • Profits were impacted by supply chain issues
  • The gods are grumpy; someone in the village must be having an affair
  • It was due to a few corrupt individuals, and does not reflect the high ethical standards, dedicated work, and consistent competence of the Department as a whole
  • Negative energy from skeptics in the room interfered with the experiment
  • Train delays due to the wrong type of snow↗︎︎ on the tracks
  • Demonic opposition, stirred up by enemy witchdoctors
  • Operational irregularities occurred
  • My assistant pronounced one of the words of the spell wrong
  • I never get that drunk

Everybody knows: I’m not that kind of guy; I wouldn’a did what I did, if I had’n of been high

Such excuses explain that the failure occurred only because you didn’t have control at the time. Therefore past failure doesn’t predict future failure, because of course in the future you will have control. Having control is “normal,” and should always be expected.

At some point, excuses run out, and the illusion of control collapses. Fear is the natural reaction to being out of control; and it can help deal with some bad situations. However, an eternalistic need to always maintain control can cause constant anxiety or even paranoia.

The eternalistic all-or-nothing tendency makes the sense of control brittle. Any temporary setback may flip you from an illusion of control into the illusion of no-control.

Illusion of helplessness: nihilistic anxiety and depression

Nihilism↗︎︎ is the stance↗︎︎ that denies all meaningful patterns. That makes meaningful control—or even influence—impossible.

Anxiety and depression are strongly associated with nihilism. Feeling of loss of control in a specific situation is frightening; feeling that you may lose all control produces pervasive anxiety. Concluding that you have lost all possibility of control—that you are entirely helpless—causes depression: the sense that all action is pointless.

Psychological research has demonstrated that depression collapses the illusion of control.10 Normally,11 people overestimate their control; when depressed, people may underestimate.12

Perceived lack of control results in learned helplessness↗︎︎—inhibition of practical action—which is believed to be closely related to depression.13 Similarly, people who experience an external locus of control have been shown to be prone to clinical depression.

Total responsibility is the confused stance↗︎︎, promoted by popular “spiritual” systems, that “you create your own reality.” Implicitly, it requires complete control of every aspect of the universe. The opposite stance, victim-think, promoted by popular “political,” “ethical,” and “psychological” systems, requires denying that you have any influence or power. Both stances try to save you from confronting the fearful question “how much control do I actually have?”. However, both absolutist answers lead to dysfunction and misery.

Research finds that people who perceive control as partly internal and partly external, and that it shifts back and forth, handle difficulties more effectively than those with either external or internal locus. This resonates with my claims for the psychological value of the complete stance↗︎︎. For this dimension of meaningness—capability—I call the complete stance light-heartedness. I’ve summarized it thus:

Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world. No need for self-criticism or for anxiety. Effortless creativity. Obstacle: Hard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes.

Self-control is impossible

Ice cream

This is obvious to anyone who has struggled to lose weight.

Eternalism wants to see the self as unitary, separate, durable, consistent, and well-defined—because then it could be in control. We are none of those things. Our selves are inherently, inescapably nebulous; and therefore uncontrollable.

It is often more accurate to see one’s self as a community of divergent, competing desires, with constantly-shifting political coalitions among them. Depending on which have the upper hand at any moment, the actions one chooses change. This frequently undermines plans and intentions. When desire for romance gains power, it forms a firm intention to avoid ice cream to lose weight and become more attractive; but when dessert time comes, desire for noms foments rebellion.14

Many excuses—particularly the excuses you make to yourself—boil down to “it wasn’t really↗︎︎ me who did that.” (“Everybody knows I’m not that kind of guy!”) At some level, this is outrageously hypocritical; but it is also honest and accurate. The political coalition of desires that drove drunk was not the same coalition that regrets it the next morning—and those coalitions are more-or-less what we call a “self.”15

Consistent choices would also depend on a clear boundary between “me in here” and “the world out there.” The self/other boundary is always somewhat nebulous, however; so you cannot make perfectly independent choices. The more open you are to others, the less control you have. You probably wouldn’t have driven home drunk if your friends at the bar hadn’t done the same.

Disgust with your own inconsistency motivates the stance of True Self. That would be “who I really am”16—a unitary, separate, durable, consistent, and well-defined ideal. The “false self” is the divided, easily-influenced, impetuous, devious, incoherent one. If only you could become your True Self, you would be perfectly virtuous and always in control.

The True Self stance motivates over-control of your desires, and totalitarianism in your internal politics. The supposed True Self—itself actually just a coalition of impulses, fantasies, and fears—becomes a tyrant. It enforces a rigid personal morality and exiles the rest of the self to a dank prison cell. Fearing internal anarchy, it suppresses most enjoyment, creativity, and spontaneity, lest they undermine its control. Festering in the dark, these suppressed self-fragments grow monstrous, twisted, powerful. When eventually they break out in revolt, the carnage can be gruesome.17

A healthy self is a series of negotiated compromises among hopes, fears, projects, desires, and relationships, based on recognition that complete control is impossible, so all aspects of the self get enough of what they need that conflict is minimized.

The upcoming chapter on selfness discusses these issues in detail.

Control of others is impossible (and attempts are harmful)

To gain complete control over your own life, you would need to control other people. Not only their actions, but also their thoughts and feelings—because those interact with your own.

Complete control of people is even more impossible than complete control of the inanimate world. Partial control or influence, by various means, is possible, and may often be benign. Sanity requires accepting that everything you do is a collaboration. It also requires accepting partial control (or influence) of others over you.

The eternalistic compulsion toward over-control leads to coercion and abuse of power. Ethical eternalism—moral certainty—provides spurious justifications for forcing other people to do what you want. This ranges in scale from family relationships to world wars.

Totalitarianism, a manifestation of political eternalism, is an extreme example. Ideologues rationalize oppression as necessary for preventing the nihilist apocalypse↗︎︎, a dystopian fantasy of ethical anarchy caused by loss of institutional control.

The stance of reasonable respectability, which fixates↗︎︎ the social order, makes despotic control easier. Its opposite, romantic rebellion, denies↗︎︎ the value of institutions, and views all power as illegitimate, coercive control.

Control by proxy

Identifying your self with a more powerful proxy can give a vicarious sense of control. This is a back-up strategy when personal control is too obviously impossible.

Proxies include individuals, such as political and religious leaders; social groups, such as tribes, nations, and sects; imaginary people, such as God, gods, or culture-heroes; and abstractions, such as political and religious ideologies.

This illusion of control depends on psychological identification, allegiance, and surrender. You have to give up your own control—in a particular area of life, at least—to transfer the locus to the proxy. Psychological surrender gives a feeling of connection or union with something much greater and more meaningful than your personal concerns.

Feeling that you are part of a group allows you to participate emotionally in its strength and success. This is true even when the tribe—or its leaders—do not provide you with any actual control over your life. Sports fandoms are a benign example. Oppressive political regimes that maintain popular support are perhaps the worst. Vicarious power through identification with the state seems an acceptable trade-off to many subjects.

In fact, this dynamic seems to underly most malign power relationships, ranging from domestic abuse through Stockholm syndrome↗︎︎ and anti-life religions↗︎︎ to totalitarian dystopias. Despotic “leaders” can never rule by force and fear alone; they depend on worshipful surrender and identification.18

Monism and dualism: control by connection and by separation

Eternalism comes in two main flavors, monist↗︎︎ and dualist↗︎︎. Monism denies↗︎︎ boundaries and fixates↗︎︎ connections. Dualism denies connections and fixates boundaries.

Control usually depends on boundaries, connections, or both. Since both are ubiquitous, it’s usually best to consider and manipulate both. However, the monism and dualism’s denials lead them to ignore one, and to try to exert control only through the other.

Monism attempts control exclusively through connections. When genuine connections do not permit control, it invents imaginary ones. This is typical of magical thinking. “Psychic powers,” New Age quack therapies, and the Law of Attraction↗︎︎ are typical examples.

Dualism attempts control exclusively through boundaries: categorizing, discriminating, separating, sorting, ranking, and purifying. This becomes dysfunctional when nebulous↗︎︎ reality fails to fit into tidy boxes. Bureaucracy, caste systems, and “enterprise software↗︎︎” are typical examples.

Control by renouncing action

↗︎︎

Popular “spiritual” books like The Secret↗︎︎ recommend abandoning all attempts at control, or even action, in favor of spiritual virtue (“positive thinking”). This is an extreme version of control-by-proxy, in which the proxy is the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, or The Entire Universe, and it does all the work.

This approach is typical in monist↗︎︎ systems, which deny all boundaries. Since, monism says, you are The Entire Universe, its actions and yours are identical. Any attempt to act on your own simply limits you, by creating an artificial and illusory separation.

Renunciation often acts as a moralistic reward fantasy. For monism, control is not OK, because control depends on differences, which monism denies. Since everything is the same, everything is equal, and nothing can be allowed to control anything else. Giving up control is a supremely virtuous act, which The Entire Universe rewards by showering you with everything you could possibly want.

Obviously, adopting this strategy leads to severe emotional dysfunction, passive-aggressive relationships, and total inability or unwillingness to deal with everyday responsibilities.

Control is intolerably dull

Total control (which requires total predictability) is totally boring. Life needs some challenges, surprises, setbacks, and serendipity to make it interesting. Enjoyment and personal growth come only with partial control.19

Highly-successful people, whose lives are too much under control, often semi-deliberately mess them up, for example with an extramarital affair whose revelation destroys their career as well as their marriage. The thrill of risk, and the difficulty of avoiding detection, breaks the monotony of excessive control. It is better, of course, to leave what is going well on autopilot, and to take on greater challenges in new domains.

Meanings are out of control

Meaningness itself is nebulous, and therefore uncontrollable. This undermines practical activity that attempts to control meaningful conditions. Nebulosity of meaning implies constant uncertainty about the merits of purposes; about what counts as progress and setbacks; about what methods would be ethical or unethical; about how your choices shape and are shaped by your self; and about implications that may go beyond the personal, immediate, and obvious, into the greater, mysterious patterns of meaning claimed by religion and social philosophy.

The puzzle of meaningness” illustrates many aspects of these problems in the context of an adultery.

The attraction was overwhelming. The sex was scalding. You loved with a passion you had never felt before.

In time, it waned; and you ended the affair.

Now, you wonder: what did that mean? In the beginning, it seemed enormously significant. By the end, it had slid into a casual friendship plus sex.

Were you mistaken in thinking it was meaningful at the start? Or did it have a meaning that it lost?

And was the affair right, or wrong, or perhaps somehow somewhere in-between?

What does it mean about you that you cheated—which you were sure you never would do? Should you be less certain about yourself in other ways?

Marriage is a sacrament; but this affair also seemed at first to have a sacred dimension. Was that just a self-justifying illusion?

  • 1. Not always, of course; sometimes you simply lack the prerequisites needed for a course of action which would be highly likely to succeed if you had then.
  • 2. At the level of fundamental physics, all forces are symmetrical; they act mutually on pairs of particles. This is not much relevant to everyday life, however. I’ll explain a more relevant, macroscopic understanding of distributed causality on the discussion of dynamical chaos↗︎︎.
  • 3. “Interaction” is still somewhat misleading, unfortunately. It suggests that there are two or more objectively separate parties involved, which is not true.
  • 4. My prehistoric PhD thesis↗︎︎ was also about improvisation and collaboration, and the impossibility of control. Some people just don’t know when to move on in life.
  • 5. Even there, tsunamis (for instance↗︎︎) make complete control impossible. Recognizing this, the trend in nuclear reactor design has been from active to passive safety. Active control makes human activity the locus, along with complex electrical systems to which humans delegate. It’s external to the reactor. Passive safety↗︎︎ shifts the locus into the reactor itself. For example, in some designs, when things go wrong, it shuts down by literally falling apart. Gravity does the work.
  • 6. Control is a major topic in academic psychological research. I have not studied the results seriously. This page is based largely on my informal observation of control confusions in everyday life. The research I have read accords with my observations. I have linked some topics to relevant Wikipedia pages, which could be starting points if you would like to investigate further. (As of mid–2015, most of the Wikipedia articles are not very good, but their references may be useful.) I have not found good overall review articles. This may be because control has been studied by many different branches↗︎︎ of psychology, using different frameworks and terminology that are difficult to align. “Born to Choose: The Origins and Value of the Need for Control↗︎︎” includes a not-terrible survey.
  • 7. The gambler’s fallacy↗︎︎ is a well-studied, if somewhat simplistic, example. “Interpretive control” is a broader psychology research term for inventing explanations in order to feel you have control when you don’t. See for instance Baumeister’s Meanings of Life↗︎︎, p. 42.
  • 8. Experimental psychology and psychotherapeutic theory corroborate most of the harmful control dynamics I describe here. Psychology has not found convincing reasons for them. They seem clearly maladaptive; so why do brains do these things? I suspect the answer is: eternalism, as such. The desire to believe that everything has a fixed meaning appears to be enormously powerful. It is significant that (as we’ll see in the next section) depression, which is the negation of eternalism, reverses most of these control dynamics. Although eternalism is partly innate, it is strongly reinforced by modern Western culture. It would be interesting to see whether harmful control dynamics are less prevalent among hunter-gatherer peoples, for instance. Based on the little I know of the relevant cognitive anthropology, I suspect the answer is yes.
  • 9. I wrote about this in more detail, but in a rather different conceptual framework, in “Unclogging↗︎︎.”
  • 10. Actually, the studies I have read only show a correlation between depression and absence of the illusion. I do not know of experiments that show conclusively which causes which. (If you do, I would love to hear about it!) Based on personal experience, I believe that the causality is bidirectional. That is, depression brought on for other reasons results in loss of the feeling of control, and feeling that important factors are out of control can provoke depression.
  • 11. “Normally” here meaning what is most common: “under the influence of eternalism.” However, I don’t think eternalism is altogether natural. I would like to believe that the complete stance↗︎︎ is “normal” (although uncommon) in being “natural”; and that adopting it would eliminate control illusions.
  • 12. Originally this was called “depressive realism↗︎︎” because in the first experiments that demonstrated it, depressed people estimated their degree of control roughly correctly. However, subsequent experiments have shown that depression correlates just with decreased sense of control, and in some situations depressed people underestimate it.
  • 13. The resulting psychological stress can be literally lethal in experimental animals.
  • 14. George Ainsle’s Breakdown of Will↗︎︎ is an outstanding analysis of this pattern, technically termed akrasia↗︎︎.
  • 15. Breakdown of Will and The Guru Papers both provide much insight here.
  • 16. This is an interesting example of the weaselly function of the word “really.”
  • 17. I wrote about aspects of this in “We are all monsters↗︎︎,” “Eating the shadow↗︎︎,” and “Black magic, transformation, and power↗︎︎.” See also Breakdown of Will↗︎︎, The Guru Papers, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow↗︎︎, which discuss the pattern extensively.
  • 18. The Guru Papers is an extensive, insightful analysis for the religious domain. For politics, “The Good Tsar Bias↗︎︎” analyzes several cases, including Hitler and Stalin. Both men created personality cults↗︎︎ according to which they were powerful, benevolent leaders whose naive goodness enabled underlings to get away with incompetence, corruption, and mass murder. “If only Stalin knew what evils are done in his name!” was a common Russian attitude. “The closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people’s identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one’s identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure.”
  • 19. This point was made famous by Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The psychology of optimal experience↗︎︎. See also my post “Tantra and flow↗︎︎.”

The wheel of fortune

The Wheel of Fortune, from the Hortus Deliciarum
Lady Luck turns the Wheel of Fortune

The meanings we care about first and foremost are good and bad. Not good and evil—not ethics, not yet—but good and bad for us. We want to know how the wheel of fortune will turn. Will particular people, things, and events be blessings—or disasters? Where do goodness and badness come from, and how can we influence them? What do good and bad events imply for other dimensions of meaningness↗︎︎—social relations, our selves, and our purposes?

Eternalism↗︎︎ promises answers: certainty about what is good and what is bad, and understanding and control over what produces them. However, “good” and “bad” are not intrinsic qualities.1 Reality is not about us, and doesn’t know or care whether it benefits or harms us. “Good” and “bad” are not merely unpredictable; they are inherently nebulous↗︎︎: mixed, shifting, ambiguous. Thus, broad answers to “will good things or bad things happen?” are impossible.

And so, again, eternalism cannot deliver. Relying on its claims about good and bad is a recipe for disappointment, if not disaster.

Elaborating meanings of good and bad

Eternalism is about seeing meaning where there is none, and adding extra meaning even to what is already genuinely meaningful. Chance events—turns of the wheel of fortune—are taken not just as good or bad, but meaningfully good or bad.

Eternalism gives good and bad events implications for all the dimensions—purpose, ethics, our selves, social relations, and so on. Good outcomes are mistaken as rewards or confirmations. Bad ones appear as omens of still worse to come, or deserved punishments, or as tests from God.

The “just world hypothesis↗︎︎” is the pervasive assumption—explicit or tacit—that good and bad outcomes are not random, but deserved. The eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ guarantees that. This is the beginning of the elaboration of good and bad into good and evil. Good and Evil often become independent actors: as vague “forces,” or personified as spooks,2 human individuals, or social groups.

Eternalistic systems typically promise good outcomes—for those who obey the demands of the eternal ordering principle. Bad outcomes are due to violations of the cosmic order. Violations can be reversed by purification, which restores the order.

If the eternal order can be violated, then how is it eternal? And, how can bad things happen to good people? Many outcomes are obviously random; eternalism is obviously wrong, as everyone knows at some level. Various strategies of self-delusion cover this up, in order to preserve an optimistic outlook. Elaborate theories of cosmic justice in the afterlife are attempts to preserve eternalism against everyday experience. When these eternalistic ploys fail, nihilism↗︎︎ looms.

Good, bad, naturalism, and supernaturalism

Old illustration of the wheel of fortune

A major theme of this chapter on eternalism is that errors usually attributed to supernaturalist religions are also common among atheists, and in naturalistic ideologies. This includes mistaken ideas about good and bad—but those are particularly prone to supernatural explanations.

In the short run, good and bad manifest as luck. A feeling of being lucky, or unlucky, is nearly impossible↗︎︎ for even the most committed secular scientific rationalist to avoid at times. “I get duped by eternalism in a casino” is a personal account of such an incident. In “No cosmic justice↗︎︎” I observed that:

A vague, incoherent expectation of cosmic justice is one of the hardest aspects of our Christian heritage to shake off. I am a life-long atheist, and have never actually believed in cosmic justice. Yet I still sometimes catch myself hoping that I will somehow be magically rewarded for good deeds.

Magical thinking is a powerful eternalist ploy. It promises certainty about the spinning wheel of fortune, through esoteric techniques such as divination, psychobabble, and career counseling. Imaginary connections “explain” random coincidences. Underlying all this is the assumption that the universe is about us—and since our lives are meaningful, everything else must be, too.

Explicitly non-supernatural eternalisms make the same promises. Communism guarantees a good outcome for history: eventually capitalism must collapse, and be replaced by a worker’s paradise. UFO cults expect imminent salvation by benevolent aliens. Techno-futurists are sure a Singularity↗︎︎ will soon deliver us from all material afflictions (or perhaps doom us to sudden extinction). These are all silly, but they postulate no supernatural forces.

Fate, destiny, and finality

Pat Sajak and Vanna White, from the TV show Wheel of Fortune
Vanna White↗︎︎ and Pat Sajak↗︎︎

In the long run, eternalism sees good and bad as the concern of fate. Proper distribution of good and bad is the main point of the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. Both individuals and social groups (tribes, nations, even our species) supposedly have fates.

We are particularly concerned about what happens in the end. This is the matter of destiny. It is commonly considered that the only real↗︎︎ meaning—of an object, event, life, or group—is the meaning it has as it ends. Whatever may happen before that doesn’t properly count.3 As an extreme case, in some versions of both Christianity and Buddhism, the only thing that matters for determining your fate in the afterlife is your mind state at the moment of death.

The final meaning is the eternal meaning, and therefore the “real” one. This discounts most actual meanings, in favor of eternalistically-ascribed ones—which is wrong. We’ll see later that this error leads to nihilism↗︎︎, when you realize that nothing is meaningful to you after you die.

Eternalism promises good outcomes to those who obey. Miserabilism↗︎︎, a stance↗︎︎ closely connected with nihilism, guarantees everyone bad outcomes.

Beyond good and bad

Humans (and other animals) evolved to force-fit everything into the categories “good,” “bad,” and “irrelevant.”4 We make snap judgements about these three—and are often proven wrong. Some events are unambiguously one way or another; but even the most important ones usually have both good and bad aspects. We acknowledge this in phrases like “a silver lining” and “a mixed blessing.”

Recognizing the nebulosity↗︎︎ of meanings is the way out of the maze of eternalism and nihilism, and into the complete stance↗︎︎. Suspending judgements of “good” and “bad” and “uninteresting” is a particularly effective escape route. Playful curiosity is characteristic of the complete stance. “What is this like?” and “How does it work?” and “What happens if…” are usually better questions than “Is this good, or bad?”

Qualifying judgements of good and bad is essential in adequate approaches to ethics and politics, particularly. (These will develop into major points later in the book.)

DESTINY: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.5

Interpreting good and bad as good and evil turns them into absolutes, over which no compromise is possible. Ever-escalating embroilment ensues. Dropping good and evil is a first step toward a non-eternalist ethics. (Although only a first step—replacing them with “harm and benefit” can lead to eternalist utilitarianism, for instance. Those, too, are nebulous—so utilitarianism can’t succeed as an eternalist system.)

For politics to be anything more than a quantitative showdown, both sides in a conflict must recognize the nebulosity of their interests. Not only are those people not simply evil, and us folks not simply holy: what they want is not purely wrong, and what we want is not an unalloyed good. When all can drop the moral posturing, all may be able to work together to find an outcome all can live with—which will not be good, bad, or uninteresting, but a nebulous combination of all three.

  • 1. They are not merely our opinions, either, though. As with all meanings, they are neither objective nor subjective.
  • 2. Benevolent and malevolent spooks, as causal explanations for good and bad outcomes, are a cultural universal. Sometimes there are also moody spooks who alternate capriciously: a sensible explanation for the randomness of good and bad events. I find it sad and telling that few care what spooks think or do when it doesn’t affect humans.
  • 3. I don’t know where this idea comes from. It’s obviously nonsense, but pervasive. I’ve tried to construct an explanation in terms of evolutionary psychology, according to which what mostly matters is whether you get progeny to adulthood before dying. An estimate of whether you are likely to succeed critically affects your optimal life strategy. The less likely evolutionary success is, the more evolutionarily rational high-stakes gambles (such as murder, rape, and robbery) become. I haven’t been able to make this explanation work, quite. Perhaps the source of the idea is mere cultural accident.
  • 4. Presumably this is an efficient strategy for animals with simple brains and simple lifestyles. It doesn’t work well for humans, but brain evolution hasn’t caught up with cultural evolution. Also: the Buddhist influence on this book should be unusually obvious here. Buddhism holds that “attraction, aversion, and indifference” are the cause of all suffering. I think that’s an oversimplification, but insightful nonetheless.
  • 5. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary↗︎︎.

Eternalism as the only salvation from nihilism

Corpus hypercubus

If all meanings are fixed↗︎︎, then ambiguous meanings are not meaningful at all. To eternalism↗︎︎, any potential nebulosity↗︎︎ of meaning looks like non-existence↗︎︎ of meaning. Any morality that is not black-and-white is just immorality; any life-purpose that is not ordained in the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ is aimless wandering; any uncertainty about who you are is intolerable.

In other words, to eternalism, every other stance↗︎︎ appears to be nihilism↗︎︎, more-or-less. Nihilism actually is harmful and wrong↗︎︎—eternalism is right about that. If nihilism were truly the only alternative, perhaps eternalism would be the least bad choice. That is a main part of its appeal.

When eternalism’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control are revealed as lies, nihilism looms. The promise to keep nihilism at bay is then eternalism’s final ploy.

Increasingly many Westerners have abandoned organized religion, but surprisingly few say they are atheists. They may say “I don’t believe in God, exactly, not as a person, but I believe in something—maybe you could say a higher power, or the universe as a whole, or maybe it’s love—it doesn’t really matter what you call it.”1

I think what they are trying to say is that they believe meaning is real; and I think they are right. Theirs is a relatively sophisticated stance: nihilism is wrong, and so are God-based religious systems↗︎︎. But it’s not true that, for meaning to be real, it has to be fixed in place by some other eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.

I will deliver good news: there is a third alternative↗︎︎ that includes what’s right about both eternalistic religion and nihilism; avoids the errors of both; is conceptually coherent; and is workable as a way of life.

  • 1. For instance, in a controversial interview↗︎︎, Oprah Winfrey told atheist Diana Nyad “I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder [of nature], and the mystery, then that is what God is. It’s not the bearded guy in the sky.”

Eternalism is harmful

Surreal image illustrating eternalism
Art courtesy↗︎︎ Dita

Eternalism↗︎︎ makes promises it can't keep. It lies about the things that are most important to us. It makes us do stupid, crazy, evil things. And we still love it and keep going back for more.

Eternalism seems so nice. It is hard to believe ill of it. Yet always it drops its victims in seething cauldrons of misery. The message of this entire book is: eternalism is bad;1 there is a better alternative↗︎︎. So, much of the book consists of warnings about eternalism’s harms. This page is an overview.

The harms are myriad. Some I have already discussed: troubles that flow from the promise of certainty, the illusion of understanding, and the fantasy of control. Some I will detail shortly, in the sections on eternalist ploys and non-theistic eternalisms. Many must be postponed to chapters on stances↗︎︎ allied with eternalism, such as mission↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎, and ethical eternalism↗︎︎, each with harms specific to its dimension of meaningness.

Broadly, we might categorize harms as:

  • Deliberate stupidity
  • Emotional regression with an abusive, addictive dynamic
  • Bad practical outcomes from unrealistic actions based on imaginary meanings
  • Emotional pain from trying to conform to eternalism when it’s obviously not working
  • Morally wrong decisions based on absolutist ethics

We are not stupid enough for eternalism

Eternalism comes naturally; human brains evolved to hallucinate meaning where there is none. Any other stance↗︎︎ takes at least a little thought. Nihilism↗︎︎, especially, is difficult. It's only possible to maintain nihilism using sophisticated rationalizations that explain away obvious meaningfulness. Other, more complex stances depend on dubious metaphysical distinctions that take work to apply in concrete circumstances.

Nevertheless, eternalism is obviously wrong. Everyone can see that many events are completely meaningless, and the meanings even of important ones are often nebulous↗︎︎.

To maintain eternalism, you have to deliberately stupefy yourself. You need to damage your own natural intelligence to not-see nebulosity and to preserve illusions of meaningfulness and cosmic order↗︎︎. Starting on the next page, I'll explain various mind-killing ploys you can use to hide eternalism’s failures and lies.

Eternalism can provide bogus feelings of intelligence, from perceiving patterns↗︎︎ that aren't there. This is the rush of excitement as the new convert to an eternalist system “discovers” that Mindfulness or Marx or Mormonism explains everything. Desire for meaning makes you willing to sabotage your critical ability, in order to accept preposterous stories in which the Cosmic Plan makes everything make sense. That inhibits curiosity and the natural drive to find a better understanding.

In the end, no one can make themselves stupid enough to accomplish↗︎︎ eternalism—to maintain the stance at all times. Everyone, at times, does recognize nebulosity—and so moves into some other stance.

Eternalism is regressive and addictive

Eternalism is comforting, when life is going well enough. Then you can choose to ignore the ways reality fails to fit fixed↗︎︎ meanings. Eternalism’s promises of hope and solace seem credible. You can live in a pastel fantasy world. So eternalism “works” as long you can maintain a childish, self-indulgent obliviousness—which is its characteristic emotional texture.

Maintaining eternalism requires emotional regression, into a toddler’s bedroom, watched over by a wise protecting parent: the Cosmic Plan, or some authority who poses as its representative. When you are unable to keep deluding yourself, you look for someone more powerful to do the job: someone or something that can affirm eternalism in the face of your perception of the contradictory evidence. The parent-figure promises to protect you from nebulosity. You choose this relationship specifically to obstruct emotional and intellectual growth↗︎︎ when that seems too frightening.

Preserving comforting illusions may be psychologically valuable in the short run, in times of crisis: as antidotes to depression, anxiety, and despair. (Those are symptoms of nihilism↗︎︎, which may be the only accessible alternative to eternalism for some people.) In the longer run, this pain-killing function leads to helplessness and addiction.

As the opening paragraph of this page suggested, a relationship with eternalism may resemble addictive dynamics of domestic abuse, which keep a victim returning to the abuser. The victim believes—rightly or wrongly—that they are powerless, and that the abuser is powerful. The victim hopes that the abuser would act as a protector against the world, if properly propitiated. This requires the victim to delude themselves that the abuser has loving intentions, and that the abuse episodes are somehow be triggered by the victim’s inadequacy.

Eternalism has bad practical results

Eternalism promises eternally good feelings. And it is a comforting ride—until it crashes into reality and you get hurled from your seat onto the open highway.

Meanings have consequences. Meaning is not an autonomous domain, disconnected from practical reality; everyone frequently acts on the basis of perceived meanings. But those are often wrong. Eternalism says the world is good, and I am good, so if I choose to do something good, then the result must be good! But often it isn’t.

As we saw earlier, eternalism’s illusions of understanding and control fantasies often lead over-confidence, excess risk-taking, over-control, and other unrealistic patterns of action. Alternatively, the delusion that you must base action on the Cosmic Plan leads to paralysis when you are unable to discern what it demands. (This is particularly common in the stance of mission↗︎︎, which is closely related to eternalism.)

Acting based on imagined meanings frequently fails. Harm and pain ensue. Eternalism’s synthetic certainty ensures that this comes as a shock, each time. Each time, one experiences it as a betrayal. I am a good person; this wasn’t supposed to happen to me!

Then, disillusioned, you may exit eternalism into another stance. Alternatively, you may apply ploys to maintain eternalism—probably in an increasingly shaky, wavering form.

Wavering eternalism is emotionally painful

Eternalism persuades you that you should maintain the stance at all times. This has moral force; if you waver↗︎︎ in your commitment, you are a bad person. However, it is impossible to accomplish↗︎︎ consistent eternalism. This implies perpetual struggle, with shame and guilt at imperfection, and much wasted effort.

The wavering eternalist feels intense confusion during periods of doubt.

When eternalism fails, it tries to convince you that it’s your fault, for wavering, for not trying hard enough, for being unworthy of the Cosmic Plan. Then you may punish yourself—as harshly as you can, to demonstrate your renewed commitment. (The Cosmic Plan can’t punish you adequately; it doesn’t exist!)

As you repeatedly experience eternalism failing when it encounters nebulosity, you develop fear and loathing of ambiguity and change. You come to avoid areas of life that seem particularly nebulous. This progressively narrows your scope for action, leading to rigidity or even paralysis. You may isolate yourself socially: from everyone, or into a closed group that agrees to pretend eternalism works. You may adopt an aggressive hostility toward anyone who reminds you of nebulosity.

You may come to feel cramped and imprisoned in the small safe space where eternalism seems to function. Creativity and daring become impossible.

You somehow cannot find your true mission↗︎︎ in life, for which eternalism would guarantee success. You neglect mundane goals as mere materialism↗︎︎, meaningless in the eyes of the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎. Most of the time, you cannot locate your true self↗︎︎; your miserable ego’s attempts to live up to its ideals are pathetic. Sometimes, you believe you have found your true self and mission, and go off on a fantastical ego-trip crusade, which needs constant confirmation from followers and eventually ends in catastrophe.

Eternalism is immoral

The eternal ordering principle is a cruel tyrant. The Cosmic Plan makes insane demands—and calls that morality. It sometimes commands harmful actions; it often fails to promote beneficial ones. Following its dictates causes damage to yourself and others.

Ethical issues are inescapably nebulous. Ethical eternalism blinds you to the complexity, ambiguity, and situatedness of moral decision-making. Taken seriously, it leads to moral absolutism and political extremism.

Religiosity promotes paranoia about contamination; blaming↗︎︎ of victims; waste of resources and opportunities; and tribalist conflict.

Eternalist ploys and their antidotes

Chess move

Eternalist ploys are ways of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting that stabilize↗︎︎ the eternalist↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎.

Eternalism is inherently unstable because it is obviously wrong and harmful. Yet it feels so good that one wants to find ways to maintain the stance. Ploys are ways to blind oneself to nebulosity↗︎︎ and to trick oneself into finding meaning where there is none.

For example:

  • Imposing fixed meanings is a way of thinking using artificial, prescribed categories
  • Hope is a way of feeling that shifts imaginary meaning to the future, when the present is obviously meaningless
  • Wistful certainty is a way of talking that asserts the presence of meaning where none can be found
  • Purification is a way of acting that forces reality to conform to meaningful concepts

Each page in this section describes one eternalist ploy: how it works, and an example of the ploy in action. I explain how each causes harm, and an antidote to apply when you find yourself using the ploy and would rather not.

It is not so easy to see the casual, random occurrences of everyday life as meaningful; so individual eternalist ploys are usually not highly effective, or not for long. Typically we switch rapidly from one to the next, as the inadequacy of each becomes obvious. Or, we deploy several at once, hoping to overwhelm our intelligence with multiple spurious arguments.

Some ploys you are unlikely to use if you are not committed↗︎︎ to eternalism. Others, everyone falls into sometimes, even when committed to nihilism↗︎︎ or the complete stance↗︎︎ (both of which reject eternalism).

You will find all of them familiar, either from personal use or from overhearing them used. Still, it may be useful to read the explicit analyses, because the concept of “eternalist ploys” may provide new insight into their operation.

The ploys are particularly easy to observe in religious fundamentalism and political extremism. Such systems use them in heavy-handed, clumsy ways, making them obvious. In this section, I mainly describe the ploys as methods for fooling yourself; but priests and politicians use them rhetorically to fool others too. Later in the book, I discuss eternalism as a route to social power.

Four groups of eternalist ploys

I have categorized the ploys into four groups.

  • By definition, eternalism means seeing everything as meaningful—although most things aren’t. The first group of ploys hallucinate meanings where there are none.
  • Many things are obviously meaningless, or have obviously nebulous↗︎︎ meanings. The second groups of ploys blind you to meaninglessness and nebulosity.
  • Sometimes it’s impossible not to perceive meaninglessness, and so all those ploys fail. The third group explains away meaninglessness.
  • Finally, if meaninglessness cannot be explained away, you have to react in some way. The fourth group tries to cope with meaninglessness when it’s unavoidable.

Alternatively, the ploys could be grouped based on whether they are typically used in monist↗︎︎ eternalism or dualist↗︎︎ eternalism—or both. Most are used in both. However, smearing meaning around, magical thinking, and bafflement are particularly useful for monist eternalism. Similarly, fixed meanings, hiding from nebulosity, arming, and purification are particularly useful in dualist eternalism.

[I am unsure about my current list of ploys. They seem to overlap and run into each other somewhat, and I also expect I may find more of them. I may need to "refactor" the categories. Feedback about this would be welcome!

For now, I have provided unfinished versions of the pages describing the ploys. They are preliminary, incomplete drafts; I’ll come back and finish them when I’m more confident that overall scheme is correct. However, there should be enough explanation for each that you will understand how they work, and so can recognize them in operation.]

Imposing fixed meanings

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The eternalist↗︎︎ ploy imposing fixed meanings is the first of several that hallucinate meanings that don’t exist, in order to avoid perceiving nebulosity↗︎︎.

This ploy tries to force a pre-determined set of categories on experience. These often have fixed positive and negative values, and demand that you take particular actions in response to them. The “abominations” of the Old Testament are examples. “Stereotypes” are one contemporary secular manifestation.

Often these categories don’t fit, and the imposed meanings are wrong. When you act on them, reality eventually slaps you upside the head. You get unpleasant outcomes you didn’t expect—based on your wrong categorization. Then you are shocked and confused; the conceptual system breaks down and you have no idea what to do.

The antidote is curiosity. Wonder what things mean; investigate without presuppositions. Allow things to mean whatever they do, or to remain mysterious or meaningless if that’s what they want. Avoid premature judgements of meaning.

Ultimately, the antidote to all eternalism is to understand, recognize, accept, and stabilize↗︎︎ the complete stance↗︎︎: that meanings are always fluid, partial, changing, and vague.

Smearing meaning all over everything

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The eternalist↗︎︎ ploy smearing meaning all over everything hallucinates imaginary meanings, to avoid perceiving meaninglessness. That makes it similar to the ploy imposing fixed meanings, but whereas that deploys rigid categories, “smearing” is non-specific.

Smeared-around meanings are usually vague. If something is labelled “inappropriate”: how, and why, and what does that actually imply?

Smearing is also usually quite undiscriminating about which things get what meanings. The important thing is that everything means something. Smearing accepts nebulous↗︎︎ meanings, but not meaninglessness.

For instance:

Traditional ways of knowing draw on the wisdom of nature, which the West has forgotten.

This is almost perfectly vague, but expresses a strong value judgement nonetheless. Not only does it devalue “the West,” it also attempts to rescue “traditional ways of knowing” from the sensible judgement that they are sometimes idiotic and virtually meaningless. “Nature” and “wisdom” are sufficiently hand-wavy that they can justify almost anything—especially if they are supposed to be “mysterious” (to unenlightened Westerners, at least).

Smearing is common in monist↗︎︎ eternalism, whereas fixed meanings are more common in dualist↗︎︎ eternalism. (See “The big three stance combinations” for an introduction to monist vs. dualist eternalism.) Monism denies↗︎︎ specifics, whereas dualism fixates↗︎︎ them. Smearing is typically justified by “intuition” (characteristic of monism), where fixed meanings are justified by categorical knowledge (characteristic of dualism).

Smeared meanings cause trouble in almost the same way as fixed ones. They fail to fit reality, so acting on them has bad outcomes. Relying on “traditional ways of knowing” to handle an Ebola outbreak is a really bad idea.

The antidote to smearing, as with imposing, is to find out what things actually mean. If you find yourself smearing a lot, learning to be clear and specific is helpful, and some rigorous intellectual work is called for. For imposing, the antidote is more to be receptive to your perceptions of meaning, moment-by-moment, and to allow them to be as they are.

Magical thinking

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Magical thinking↗︎︎ is hallucinating a causal connection where there is none.1 It includes ideas such as destiny, “messages from God” (or “from the universe”), belief in physical effects of “magical” acts, psychic powers, and so forth.

Magical thinking is a common form of patternicity. It is a common ploy for making eternalism↗︎︎ seem workable when it is not.

Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed meaning. Magical thinking gives specific, wrong meanings to many meaningless events; and eternalism can be used as a theoretical framework for justifying the meanings given by magical thinking. (“It’s not just a naturally-occurring omen, it’s a message from God!”) So there is a powerful synergy between eternalism and magical thinking. In fact, most major religions probably began as systematic appropriations of everyday magical thinking by elite eternalist priesthoods.

However, magical thinking is not necessarily eternalist. For example, believing homeopathy works, without giving it any spiritual significance, is magical thinking—but not eternalism. On the other hand, if you think homeopathy has something to do with cosmic Oneness↗︎︎, that is eternalistic.

Magical thinking causes harm when you act on mistaken causal beliefs and get bad results.

Part of the antidote to magical thinking is understanding that brains just naturally do it. You have to watch out for it. Once you see its patterns, catching it becomes automatic, and you can laugh at it.

Another part of the antidote is to learn how the world actually works↗︎︎.

  • 1. More precisely, magical thinking is belief in a causal connection without having an adequate epistemological basis. There are interesting borderline cases, such as nutritional “science”—which I write about later—for which the epistemological basis is contested. I am more skeptical of nutritional “science” than most people; and I also believe that it is heavily laden with covert moral claims, thereby attributing ethical meanings to food that it does not have. All this makes nutrition a fascinating contemporary example of eternalism, magical thinking, and the metastasis of ethics into domains where it has no legitimate business.

Hope

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Hope springs eternal… istically.

Hope shifts imagined meaning to the future, when the present is obviously meaningless.

Hope is harmful in devaluing the present and shifting attention to imaginary futures that may never exist. Hope causes emotional stunting and childishness. It is inimical to emotional growth.

This page will discuss the putative value of hopeful illusions as defenses against anxiety, depression, and despair. (The logic of that is really that hope is an antidote to nihilism↗︎︎, which is seen as the only alternative. That’s a different ploy.) It may function as a useful defense in emergencies, but illusion is counter-productive as a long-term or general strategy.

Even in crises, hope can be harmful. Since eternalism consists of blindness to nebulosity, it is destabilized by anything that brings nebulosity to our attention. Fortunately, nebulosity is indirectly visible in everyday life: as uncertainty, surprise, endings, confusion, breakdowns, and disagreement.

Unfortunately, when in the eternalist stance, it is usually only negative manifestations of nebulosity that can shock us out of blindness. Generally that leads to nihilism↗︎︎ rather than the complete stance↗︎︎. This happens for all of us, frequently. “Damn, I seem to have inadvertently offended that person I met recently who I hoped might be a friend. Oh, well, I guess it was pointless to try anyway.” More dramatically, personal crises (such as the death of a family member) are probably the most common triggers for crises of religious faith.

Crisis, by destabilizing eternalism, can be an opening into either nihilism or the complete stance. We should prepare for this. In a crisis, we generally get caught up in strategic suffering, i.e. frantically trying to get the world to go back to behaving the way we think it ought to. It is difficult then to think about what may seem like abstract philosophical concerns. Knowing that unwanted events are likely to tip us into nihilism, knowing how to recognize nihilism as we shift into it, and knowing the antidotes to nihilism, is a first step.

I will discuss, in passing, hope as a Christian “theological virtue↗︎︎.” This is hope specifically for salvation. It derives from will, not from the passions.

The antidote to hope is active acceptance of the present as it is, and prospective acceptance of the future, however it will be.

I have written about this from a Buddhist perspective at "Charnel ground↗︎︎" and "Pure Land↗︎︎"—a pair of essays that are best read together.

Pretending

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Eternalism↗︎︎ is so obviously wrong that it can’t fool anyone completely or consistently. We always know better, at some level.

That means eternalism always contains an element of make-believe. Every eternalist thought, speech, and act feels like children putting on eye patches and pretending to be pirates, launching daring raids on the cookie jar from a corvette that looks suspiciously like the dining room table.

Eternalist systems often explicitly demand suspension of disbelief (“you gotta believe!”). This is as true of eternalist political systems as of monotheist religions.

Pretending, like hope, is harmfully anti-growth. It causes emotional and intellectual stunting; childishness.

The antidote, as for kitsch, is realism. Just stop pretending.

Colluding for eternalism

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Because eternalist↗︎︎ delusion is so desirable, we collude to maintain it. We implicitly agree to agree to whatever meanings our social group comes up with. We support each other in not-seeing the nebulosity↗︎︎ that contradicts those meanings. We choose not to mention it; to distract each other from it; to pretend the elephant of meaninglessness is not taking up most of the room.

This is genuinely compassionate activity. We all want to save each other from nihilism↗︎︎.

People are often passionately attached↗︎︎ to some eternalist system↗︎︎ or other, but the details are insignificant. All that matters is that they hold nebulosity at bay. It’s common for people to switch from intense commitment to one political ideology, or religion, to another. What they seek is a supportive social group that confirms that everything makes sense.

Since the details don’t matter, those are typically delegated to the leaders of an eternalism-based institution, such as a church or political party. Such institutions are tools for organizing eternalist collusion.1

The antidote to collusion is pointing out nebulosity. As an individual, one can smile and remain silent when someone tries to get you to agree that everything is meaningful; and that is usually best. However, changing the social dynamic does require active contradiction.

This is quite tricky, and must be done skillfully. There are always ethical complexities in trying to change other people. Switching away from eternalism is one of the most profound changes anyone can make; and it can easily lead into nihilism, which may be worse. So the stakes are quite high.

The Angry New Atheists and the Speculative Realists seem examples of un-skillful contradiction. The tirades of the Angry Atheists are tinged with nihilistic rage and intellectualization; Speculative Realism↗︎︎ is tinged with nihilistic anxiety, depression, and intellectualization. This is unhelpful (although the New Atheists overall have probably done much good.) As with all attempts to change people’s political or religious opinions, the tendency is to score points to enhance your status in your in-group, rather than to sincerely engage with the people you are trying to convert in order to help them.

Humor is the best method for demonstrating nebulosity and meaninglessness. Not “jokes” as such, but pointing out how cute it is when meaning and meaninglessness, pattern↗︎︎ and nebulosity, play together like puppies, nipping and tickling each other, tumbling over and over.

  • 1. The Guru Papers provides much insight into the workings of eternalist social groups.

Hiding from nebulosity

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Hiding from nebulosity is the first of several eternalist↗︎︎ ploys that blind you to evidence of meaninglessness. (Previous pages in this section discussed ploys that allow you to hallucinate meaning where there is none—a related but different strategy.)

This ploy attempts to physically avoid nebulous↗︎︎ situations and information.

It’s difficult to apply this ploy as an individual. It’s more effective when applied by social groups (such as religious sects or fringe political movements).

Extreme examples are closed cults, which try to isolate their members from anything that contradicts their eternalist beliefs.

Hiding doesn’t work well. Even in a cult compound, you can’t separate yourself from the obvious meaninglessness of everyday randomness.

Attempts to hide leave you narrow and fearful.

The antidote is to allow, or even actively seek, nebulosity. Experiment with odd media, anomalous situations, and unfamiliar social groups or cultures. Learn to enjoy not understanding quite what is going on.1

(This is related to the method “eating the shadow↗︎︎” I’ve written about elsewhere.)

Nebulosity provokes anxiety, so one should not rush this process. Sensible care is called for.

Kitsch and naïveté

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Kitsch is one of the main ploys of eternalism↗︎︎. In Milan Kundera’s memorable phrase, “kitsch is the denial of shit”. For “shit” we can substitute nebulosity↗︎︎, which eternalism finds unacceptable. Kitschy eternalism simply refuses to see meaninglessness, even where it is obvious.

This leads to a willfully idiotic sentimentality. We try to live in a pastel-colored Disneyfied world in which everything works out for the best in the end, everyone is well-intentioned (although sometimes confused), there is a silver lining in every cloud, everyone is beautiful inside, when life gives you lemons you make lemonade, and all the world needs is love. 1

Kitsch is a refusal to seriously engage with spiritual problems. Any anomalies are dismissed as being due to finite human understanding of God’s benevolent intent. Reasonable faith is replaced with credulousness.

False and exaggerated emotion is characteristic of eternalist kitsch.

The antidote to kitsch

The antidote to kitsch is realism: the acknowledgement of shit. Realism requires no particular method or insight; merely willingness. Kitsch is idiotic because we always know better; we just don’t want to admit it.

The danger in applying this antidote—and a reason we fear to do so—is that we may conclude that everything is shit. That, however, is nihilism↗︎︎. We must acknowledge both nebulosity and pattern. The term “kitsch” comes from art criticism; it describes “art” that is self-consciously “beautiful” or sweet. Art that is self-consciously ugly and repellent is equally false, and in recent decades has become equally trite. Authentic art acknowledges the inseparability of light and darkness, and can be a path to non-duality.

  • 1. According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel that watches over it and encourages it to grow. Isn’t that darling?

Armed & armored eternalism

Archangel Michael defeating Satan (Guido Reni, 1635)

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Arming and armoring oneself is a ploy for maintaining eternalism↗︎︎. When nebulosity↗︎︎ is obvious, eternalism fails to fit reality. The response is to armor oneself against evidence, and to arm oneself to destroy it.

Kitschy sentimentality can serve as armor against recognizing nebulosity↗︎︎. We blind ourselves to mystery; we try to make the world small and comfortable; and suffer when we encounter vastness.

The cost of armoring is blindness to opportunity. Much good is left undone because an eternalist code did not recommend it, and much harm is done because the code required it. Less obviously, but perhaps even more importantly, we lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.

When sentimentality feels threatened, it turns ugly—because the function of sentimentality is self-protection. Confronted with evidence that our code is imperfect, we retreat to a harsher, more restrictive code, and seek to impose it on the uncooperative world as well as ourselves. We become censorious and self-righteous.

When the armor wears thin, we crank it up into melodrama. We make ourselves up as heroes in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Alas: those who are too sure they are on the side of God are capable of the greatest evil. Armed eternalism results in hostility, punishment of self and others, narrowness, bitterness, and brittleness.

When the supposed Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ collides with what is decent and sensible, one either does the apparently right thing, which erodes one’s commitment↗︎︎ to eternalism, or one follows the prescription. If that has a bad outcome, one must blind oneself to the failure. We do that by hardening ourselves, and often also by hardening our interpretation of the code—against the temptation to weaken it to fit reality.

Eternalism makes you think “nice” people will behave the way you want them to. When they don’t, you demonize them, and try to control or punish them. In fact, Kundera’s theory of kitsch was motivated by his analysis of totalitarian communism in his native Czechoslovakia; totalitarianism, he concluded, is kitsch in government.

In the pathological extreme, armed eternalism sees any deviation as a threat that must be destroyed, and becomes sociopathic. We may launch witch-hunts, or conduct internal witch-hunts, scouring our own minds for evidence of sinful thoughts. Vast crimes have been justified in the name of eternalism: Inquisition, religious wars, and genocides.

Armed eternalism sees totalitarianism as the only defense against the nihilist apocalypse. (Of which, more in future chapters.) But the dichotomy between totalitarianism and apocalypse is false; due, as usual, to nihilism appearing to be the only alternative to eternalism.

The antidotes are relaxation and de-escalation. As you learn that nebulosity need not be negative, you can allow ambiguity increasingly. As you allow ambiguity, there is less and less need to war against evidence of it.

Faith

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Faith is an eternalist ploy for blinding yourself to nebulosity↗︎︎. It means explicitly choosing to ignore experience or reason when they contradict eternalism. This need not be faith in any particular belief or system, but simply in certainty that there is some meaningful order to everything.

Faith implies dumbing yourself down, and looking for external authority to affirm eternalism over reality as you can perceive it.

The antidote is regaining self-trust and intelligence by learning, through experience, that personal observation and reasoning can yield accurate understanding.

Thought suppression

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Thought suppression is the eternalist ploy that hides nebulosity↗︎︎ and meaninglessness simply by rejecting thoughts that would make them obvious.

The thought “maybe everything is meaningless” might be intolerable. In your experience, it may lead immediately to full-blown nihilism↗︎︎. So you choose not to think it.

It’s hard to choose never to think of something. (“Don’t think of a pink elephant.”) To suppress a thought effectively, you have to recognize warning signs that it’s coming. For instance, there are thoughts that tend to lead you to the one you want to avoid. “Maybe there’s nothing in particular I’m meant do with my life” can lead to “so maybe everything is meaningless” (although it need not). So it’s better not to think that either. And “I don’t really know what I’m meant to do with my life” leads to “maybe nothing,” so better not think that.

Since meaninglessness is so common, a multitude of observations and thoughts could eventually lead you to the wrong conclusion that everything is meaningless. The more often you apply thought suppression, the wider the domains of experience you have to blank.

Thought-terminating clichés

One tactic for stopping an unwanted train of thought is to apply a counter-thought.1 Among these are thought-terminating clichés.

A cliché is a fixed↗︎︎ thought that ends an authentic line of inference. For example: “everyone is put on earth for a reason.” That ends patterns of thinking that might lead to “nothing really has any purpose.” This thought is not something you are likely to come up with yourself; it’s part of the thought soup↗︎︎ of our culture. You hear someone “wise” saying it when you are teenager, and take it over as your own. There’s no good reason to believe it, but you accept it originally on authority and then because it makes you feel better.

Here are some more examples:

  • There is someone for everyone.
  • His time had come, I guess.
  • Everything happens for the best.
  • Everything is part of the unfolding plan for the universe.
  • God works in mysterious ways.

The term “thought-terminating cliché” comes from Robert J. Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism↗︎︎. This book has useful insights into several of the eternalist ploys. He writes:

“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In [Chinese Communist] thought reform, for instance, the phrase ‘bourgeois mentality’ is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments. And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these cliches become what Richard Weaver has called “ultimate terms”: either “god terms,” representative of ultimate good; or “devil terms,” representative of ultimate evil. In thought reform, “progress,” “progressive,” “liberation,” “proletarian standpoints” and “the dialectic of history” fall into the former category; “capitalist,” “imperialist,” “exploiting classes,” and “bourgeois” (mentality, liberalism, morality, superstition, greed) of course fall into the latter. Totalist language then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, ‘the language of nonthought.’”

Punishing bad thoughts

Another tactic is punishing yourself for thinking unwanted thoughts.

Eternalist authorities recommend actively rooting about in your psyche to find bad (“sinful”) thoughts and punish them. These might be labelled as morally bad (so they deserve punishment); but they can be anything that contradicts the stance you are trying to maintain. For eternalism, lack of faith is a sin.

Harm

Thought suppression leads to deliberate stupidity.

Thought suppression can be involved in any confused stance↗︎︎. Every confused stance involves not-seeing something about meaning; suppressing thoughts that would lead to that could always help maintain the confusion. However, thought suppression is particularly characteristic of eternalism, because eternalism is particularly simple and stupid.

Thought suppression also leads to a sensation of claustrophobic imprisonment within a limited set of safe thoughts; of timidity in the face of the unfamiliar; and a strangled inability to express oneself.

A fascinating personal account of the harm of thought suppression was posted as a comment on this site.

Antidote

The antidote is to allow thoughts.

For this, mindfulness meditation may be particularly useful. That mainly consists of non-judgmental awareness of thoughts. Since thoughts are mostly just junk we’ve taken over from our culture, you can regard them as not-particularly-mine. Therefore, they don’t say anything about “me,” which makes them less frightening.

In practicing mindfulness meditation, you discover what you think. This comes as a surprise to everyone!

Bargaining and recommitment

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When eternalism↗︎︎ collides with reality—as it eventually must—and causes needless suffering, you are tempted to abandon it. But eternalism is so attractive, and the apparent alternative—nihilism↗︎︎—so appalling that this is unacceptable. So a common ploy is to cut a deal.

You make a bargain with eternalism that it will behave better, and in return you will recommit↗︎︎ to your faith in it. This bargain may be the product of negotiation over a period ranging from seconds to years.

Of course, the argument is entirely in your head. And, of course, eternalism has no intention of keeping its side of the deal.

Eternalism will let you down over and over—because the world isn’t actually as it promises. This can produce an addictive cycle. When vagueness and meaningless are less obvious, eternalism delivers its emotional rewards. When they are more obvious, chaos, confusion, pain and doubt arise. Then you wonder what you did wrong. You may punish yourself on eternalism’s behalf. You try to figure out how to make the good feelings come back. If only, you think, I could really believe. If only my life weren’t such a mess. I know! I’ll promise to believe again, if life promises to go back to normal.

The antidote is to use periods of doubt as productive openings in which you can switch to the complete stance↗︎︎. This requires understanding that nihilism is not the only alternative to eternalism, and some skill in avoiding the slide into nihilism.

It’s only possible to combat eternalism’s ploys effectively if you can also combat nihilism’s ploys. Otherwise, it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Wistful certainty

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Wistful certainty, a ploy for maintaining the eternalist↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎, follows this pattern of thinking:

There must be a…

For example,

  • There must be a God, or at least a Something
  • There must be a meaning to life
  • There must be a special purpose I was put here to fulfill
  • There must be a right ethical system↗︎︎
  • There must be a correct form of government
  • There must be a reason this happened
  • There must be a rational explanation for everything

“Wistful” certainty occurs when one can’t think of a reason there “must” be whatever it is. One is sure, however, because eternalism wouldn’t work if whatever it is weren’t true.

  • There must a God, or at least a Something, because otherwise: there would be nothing to hold meaning reliably in place↗︎︎.
  • There must be a meaning to life, because otherwise: it’s meaningless and I might as well kill myself.
  • There must be some special purpose I was put here to fulfill, because otherwise: I would be worthless.
  • There must be a right ethical system, because otherwise: I’d have no idea what to do.
  • There must be a correct form of government, because otherwise: there would be no way to guarantee justice.
  • There must be a reason this happened, because otherwise: the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ would be incomplete.
  • There must be a rational explanation for everything, because otherwise: the universe wouldn’t make sense.

This is wistful because one wishes one could think of a better justification than “or else eternalism would fail.” It is certain because the possibility of letting go of eternalism seems unthinkably awful.

Wistful certainty is the first of several ploys for explaining away non-perception of meaning. This is a little different from earlier ploys that hallucinate particular meanings, or that blind you to meaninglessness. In this third category of ploys, you are aware that you are not perceiving meaning.

Wistful certainty tends to lead to paralysis, because you believe you don’t have enough understanding to act accurately.

Wistful certainty can also lead to imposing fixed meanings or smearing random meanings around, as ways of resolving the anxiety of not-knowing.

The antidote is to remind yourself that many things are meaningless, or have inherently vague meanings, and that action is possible anyway.

Faithful bafflement

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Faithful bafflement is a ploy for maintaining the eternalist↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎, closely related to wistful certainty. It admits a further quantum of doubt. It may feel anguished, rather than wistful:

  • I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!
  • I don’t know what it all means!
  • How can this have happened!

It is faithful, because you have not yet let go of eternalism. But where wistful certainty is sure there is some answer (though it is not visible), faithful bafflement starts to suspect there is no answer (though eternalism must somehow be correct anyway).

Like wistful certainty, faithful bafflement can lead to paralysis.

As with wistful certainty, the antidote is to use doubt as an opening. Existential crises force spiritual questions; they can lead you into into pathological confusion, but they can also clarify meaningness and lead into the complete stance↗︎︎.

One tactic is to turn around the expression of bafflement, and to personalize it.

If you are upset about a moral choice and exclaim “I don’t know what I am supposed to do!”, ask yourself: “supposed by whom?”

This tactic works even for staunch atheists. We all have at the back of our minds a shadowy authority figure by whom we will be judged. It takes more than a current membership card in the Council for Secular Humanism to dispel that bogeyman. In calm and rational times he hides from the light of rationality, but in dark and troubled moments we feel his boney hand on our shoulder.

Instead of “I don’t know what it all means!” ask: “what does this mean to me? What does it mean to my family or community?”

Rather than trying to answer “How can this have happened!” in terms of the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, you can look for a practical answer. And you can also remind yourself that many things happen for no reason at all.

Mystification

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Mystification is a ploy for maintaining the eternalist↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎. Like wistful certainty, it is a tactic for explaining away non-perception of meaning. It is the next step when faithful bafflement fails.

Mystification uses thoughts as a weapon against authentic thinking. It creates glib, bogus metaphysical explanations that sweep meaninglessness under the rug. It can be vague, poetic, emotive (typical of monist↗︎︎ mystification), or elaborately conceptual and intellectual (typical of dualist↗︎︎ mystification).

Eternalist ideologies claim to have all the answers. However, when push comes to shove, they admit that some things are mysterious. In fact, the mysteries turn out to include all the major questions about each of the dimensions of meaningness↗︎︎.

Still, eternalist ideologies insist that it is not mysterious which things are mysterious; nor how they are mysterious; nor what the mystery means. One is not to inquire into that which is mysterious, to come to have a tentative opinion about it. Mystery is not allowed to be mysterious: We know everything about it, says eternalism.

In fact, according to this ploy, mystery always means the same thing: apparent meaninglessness is the very best proof that everything is meaningful. Everything mysterious is bundled together and labeled “sacred” or “miraculous” or “cosmic.” Or, more specifically, “God’s plan, not for man to know”; or “the historically-inevitable working-out of class struggle”; or “the uncomputable but optimal decision strategy.”

Mystification produces half-assed mumbo-jumbo explanations. Acting based on these fails—naturally!—with more-or-less disastrous results.

The antidote to mystification is actual thinking. “Actual thinking” means not simply repeating thoughts you have taken over from an ideology, but active curiosity and investigation and questioning and reasoning. It involves skepticism; not the pseudo-skepticism of rejecting claims your tribe rejects, but actively wondering about how things are, and refusing to accept attractive stories that make no sense.

Thinking is a skill. There are many specific methods, taught for example in the “critical thinking” curriculum, and it is worth learning them. It is also important to realize that thinking must go beyond method.

Recognizing meaninglessness can be an opening into vastness. That is what mystification promises—but then it delivers the opposite. It gestures at vastness, but immediately closes it off by labeling it, and by pretending to explain some ultimate insight into its nature.

The best antidote to mystification is to appreciate, and open to, the experience of vastness. That is wonderment.

Rehearsing the horrors of nihilism

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When most ploys for maintaining eternalism↗︎︎ have failed, sometimes the best that can be said for it is that it is less bad than nihilism↗︎︎. And, if nihilism were indeed the only alternative, that might be true.

Reminding yourself of how bad nihilism is can help you maintain the eternalist stance. Reminding others of how bad it is can help stabilize them in the stance.

This is the hellfire and brimstone of eternalist preaching. It’s likely to produce fear and loathing.

Also, it can backfire. It’s hard to explain the harm of nihilism without explaining how nihilism works. Explaining nihilism is likely to make it seem plausible. So rehearsing nihilist horror can actually pop you into nihilism, rather than keeping you out!

The antidote to this ploy is to compare eternalism with the complete stance↗︎︎ rather than with nihilism.

The nihilist apocalypse

This page, when finished, may introduce the nihilist apocalypse. I’ll definitely discuss that in several places later in the book, but this might be a good point to begin.

The nihilist apocalypse is the supposed catastrophe that would occur if nihilist views became widespread. In the imagination of some eternalists, eternalism is the only thing keeping the rabble in check. Nihilism, if widely adopted, leads to a world of total license, in which the masses naturally follow their basest instincts and engage in the worst sort of depravity.1 The dangerous idea that there are no absolute moral rules gradually spreads from the decadent intelligentsia to the coarse lower classes, who then lose all respect for authority, indulge in their natural promiscuity, breed like rabbits, play vile music, worship blood-drinking demons, casually commit rape and murder, tear down all institutions, destroy Western civilization, and let loose a wave of anarchy and violence that precipitates a thousand-year Dark Age.

Social breakdown is not impossible, and nihilistic ideas are indeed harmful to social cohesion. However, the apocalyptic worst-case fantasy is unrealistic. It’s highly exaggerated, precisely because eternalism is also unrealistic. Only extreme threats justify extreme solutions—and eternalism is extreme.

The nihilist apocalypse often features in the rhetoric of political and ethical eternalism.

  • 1. The worst sort of depravity involves aardvarks. Just so you know. The details can only be hinted at, of course. It’s probably best just to avoid aardvarks altogether.

Purification

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Purity is an obsessive focus for dualist↗︎︎ eternalism↗︎︎. It mobilizes emotions of disgust, guilt, shame, and self-righteous anger.

The classic discussion is Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo↗︎︎. There is also much useful analysis in The Guru Papers, which draws on Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism↗︎︎.

The purity obsession's harms are a narrowed scope of action, and various neuroses (avoidant-compulsive; superiority complex).

An effective antidote is deliberately playing with "impurity."↗︎︎

Fortress eternalism

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Eternalism↗︎︎ is the confused stance↗︎︎ that everything has a fixed meaning. Various ploys try to maintain that stance in the face of frequent evidence that most things do not have definite meanings. When these fail, a fallback is to try to maintain eternalism where it seems most critical or plausible, and wall that off from everything else, which you abandon to nebulosity↗︎︎.

It is difficult, for instance, to see how earthquakes, tsunamis, and famines could be willed by a benevolent God; or meaningful; or anything other than disasters that just happened. It is difficult not to fall into the stance that most things are God’s will, but not some bits that cause you trouble.

For the liberally-minded, it is common to abandon the view that life has a definite purpose, while continuing to insist that some particular scheme of ethics (utilitarianism, for instance) is definitely correct↗︎︎. Then one has abandoned eternalism in the dimension of purpose, while preserving it in the dimension of ethics.

Fortress eternalism has all the same defects and harms as full-on eternalism—within the territory you hold eternalistically. Also, if you misinterpret nebulosity as meaninglessness, then you are effectively a nihilist↗︎︎ as far as anything outside your domain of safety is concerned; and you are subject to the harms of nihilism when you venture there.

Terrifyingly, as you try to tend your eternalist garden, you find the outer darkness encroaching. Areas of visible chaos inexorably expand. Having initially admitted a tiny bit of nebulosity, it spreads like a puddle of black ink—because in fact everything is nebulous. You can try to build dams, bulwarks against the encroaching tide, by redoubling commitment to eternalism; but you find that more and more of everyday life becomes the domain of nebulosity. Eternalist belief is increasingly relegated to Sunday morning. Increasingly, you become a nihilist↗︎︎ in practice, even while maintaining commitment↗︎︎ to eternalism in theory.

Since eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed meaning, fortress eternalism is not really eternalism at all. This last-ditch ploy transitions you from eternalism to some next stance↗︎︎.

This is, actually, an opportunity to move to the complete stance↗︎︎. When the last defense finally collapses, you can see that all is nebulous. If you remember then that nebulosity is not meaninglessness, and recognize patterns of meaning remaining after eternalism has collapsed—you have found the complete stance.

Accomplishing eternalism

Ascended yogi

Accomplishing↗︎︎ eternalism would mean always knowing the fixed↗︎︎ meaning of everything, and acting accordingly. That is impossible, because there are no fixed meanings. It’s also not possible to completely blind yourself to nebulosity↗︎︎, and not possible to always give in to the insane demands of supposed fixed meanings.

Mainstream Christianity recognizes this, actually, with the doctrine of original sin. It is not possible for humans to avoid sin. Everyone is sometimes in conflict with eternal meaning.

Some eternalist religious sects (typically termed the “mystical” branches) claim that accomplishment is possible. You can perfectly unify your self with the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ while in this life. This usually implies monism↗︎︎, and I’ll discuss such mysticism in detail in the monist chapter of Meaningness.

Some eternalistic political ideologies claim that collective accomplishment is inevitable; history guarantees utopia, eventually. Some non-political eternalist progress ideologies (versions of transhumanism, for instance) also say that accomplishment is at least possible in principle.

Exiting eternalism

Surreal image of exiting
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Ubé

When the promises of eternalism are revealed as lies, when the harm it does becomes impossible to overlook—you exit.

Exit is rarely dramatic. Eternalism↗︎︎ is so wrong that you drop it frequently, in the moment—but adopt↗︎︎ it again a minute later. Stances↗︎︎ are extremely unstable, and hard to maintain for long. Even if you are committed↗︎︎ to an eternalistic system (a religion, for example), you ignore its claims about meaning many times a day, when they contradict practical reality.

If you are committed↗︎︎ to a particular confused↗︎︎ stance, growing understanding of its defects may lead eventually to a dramatic “deconversion experience”—of leaving a religious or non-religious eternalist system, for example. This book is mostly not about that.1 It’s about the unnoticed moment-to-moment movements of meaningness↗︎︎.

Exiting eternalism implies adopting an alternative stance toward meaningness.2 The specific way eternalism breaks down in a particular situation guides you into another stance, which seems to offer a solution.

This book advocates moving from confused stances (such as eternalism) to the complete stance. The complete stance is relatively inaccessible, so this is difficult at first. Generally one is tossed from one confused stance to another, without even noticing, much less understanding. A first step toward accomplishing↗︎︎ the complete stance is noticing the transitions between other stances. Becoming aware of movements among stances, and what triggers them, helps you understand the emotional dynamics of each. Learning to recognize the promises a stance makes, and reflecting on its repeated failure to deliver, kills the allure for you—and then you can escape its grip.

Where you may go next

No exit
Also courtesy↗︎︎ Ubé

Because eternalism is the simplest, most basic confused↗︎︎ stance, you may transition from it to almost any other. Exiting one of the more specific stances, discussed later in the book, typically can lead to only a few others. I’ll discuss likely exit moves for each stance in the chapter about it. (The schematic overview of stances also lists the most likely next stances adopted when exiting each.)

From eternalism, there are three groups of stances you might move to: quasi-eternalistic stances, nihilism and quasi-nihilistic stances, and the complete stance.

The most closely allied stances are “circumscribed eternalisms.” These admit that some things are not meaningful, but insist on fixed meanings for others. For example, mission↗︎︎ says that “mundane” purposes are meaningless, really↗︎︎, but insists that “eternal” purposes are ultimately↗︎︎ meaningful. Such stances preserve much of the feeling-tone of eternalism. They are attractive when eternalism’s promises still seem generally plausible, but when its absolutism is obviously unworkable in a particular situation.

When a betrayal by eternalism leaves you feeling sick, nihilism↗︎︎ or one of its allied stances may look more attractive. Outright nihilism is nearly impossible to maintain, but you can adopt it transiently. In the longer term, you might commit to some kind of Nihilism Lite, like materialism↗︎︎. Materialism (as I use the word in this book) is the stance that higher purposes are meaningless, but mundane, material ones are real.

With practice, you can learn to avoid both these possibilities. Instead, when you notice you are in the eternalist stance—when you find yourself insisting on a fixed↗︎︎ meaning—you can use that as a reminder to move to the complete stance.

Learning skillful exits

Altnabreac Station exit
Altnabreac Station exit image courtesy↗︎︎ Rob Faulkner

This book aims to provide methods for deliberately moving out of wrong, dysfunctional stances into accurate, functional ones. Mostly, people seem unaware of the dynamics I describe, and so get pushed around helplessly, from one confused stance to the next, when difficulties arise. Instead, you can use moments of breakdown as openings to move on deliberately—ideally, to the complete stance. Troubles with meaning are valuable if you are prepared to transition and know where best to head. That requires understanding how all the stances work: what makes the confused ones attractive, how they inevitably fail, and why the complete stance is better. This takes intellectual understanding, thorough emotional familiarity, and then skill developed through repetitive practice.

Overall, the method could be described as destabilizing confused stances and stabilizing the complete stance.

  • Eternalism consists of denying↗︎︎ nebulosity↗︎︎, so learning to recognize nebulosity is the general method for destabilizing the stance.
  • Since eternalism’s appeal is the promise of certainty, understanding, and control, realizing that it cannot deliver those destabilizes it.3
  • In the eternalist ploys section, I have also suggested antidotes for many more specific patterns of eternalist thinking, feeling, and action.
  • Just exiting eternalism is insufficient, though, if that simply drops you into another confused stance. Each needs its own antidotes—discussed later in the book.
  • The complete stance consists of acknowledging both nebulosity and pattern↗︎︎, so stabilizing it involves learning to appreciate mixtures of the two. That too must wait for later.
  • 1. There are many books advocating leaving theistic eternalism for atheism. They overlap in content with this book—but mostly only with this chapter.
  • 2. Could one take no stance at all? In some sense, the complete stance↗︎︎ is that no-stance, because it does not limit meaningness in any way. That is what makes it “complete.” It allows meanings to be however they are, without metaphysical pre-commitment to their being one way or another.
  • 3. Conversely, an antidote to nihilism is realizing that partial knowledge, understanding, and control are possible.

Non-theistic eternalism

Eternalism↗︎︎ is the confused stance↗︎︎ that everything has a definite meaning. The form of eternalism that is most obvious in the West is religion: supposedly, God makes everything meaningful. However, non-theistic eternalism may actually be more influential and more harmful.

Non-theistic eternalism has all the same defects as the religious varieties, but this is less well-known, and therefore harder to defend against. Freeing ourselves from theism is only a first step toward freeing ourselves from a host of ubiquitous, harmful, mistaken ideas about meaningness↗︎︎.

It is easy for atheists to feel smug and superior about our more accurate worldview. Yet we commonly slide into malign non-theistic eternalism, which is just as distorted, and causes just as much trouble, as religion.

It is always tempting to find some ultimate source of meaning. (Especially when it seems the only alternative would be nihilism↗︎︎.) That temptation leads directly to eternalism, with all the harm that entails.

Belief in the supernatural is harmful, but several modern eternalist systems are thoroughly naturalistic (or pretend to be, anyway). I believe it is not mainly supernaturalism that is harmful about religion, it is eternalism.

“Reason” was the first substitute proposed for God, back in the European Enlightenment, and it is still the most influential. Reason, after all, led us out of the nightmare of religion. What better to crown as the new ruler? It seems to make sense that the world would make sense—that there is a meaningful pattern↗︎︎ to everything—and that, using rationality, we can discover it.

Clear thinking is always a good thing, but ideological concepts of rationality (or “Reason”) can distort it into an eternalism. Eternalist rationality has most of the same features as religion—the same attractions, harms, ploys, and antidotes. It cannot deliver on its shining promises, because the world doesn’t make complete sense. Reality is nebulous↗︎︎. Eternalist rationalism has to lie and cheat to hide that, and so commits violence against accurate perception.

Political ideologies can also substitute for religion. Meaning is mainly a social activity, and political theories claim to provide explanations for social interactions. Political ideologies say what the patterns of society are; what they mean; and what they should be. However, all social interaction is, in reality, nebulous. Therefore, political theories cannot deliver the utopias they promise. Reliably, instead, they deliver oppressive dystopias; sometimes, when taken sufficiently seriously, deliberate multi-megadeath catastrophes.

Among non-theistic eternalisms, I will analyze rationality and political ideology in some detail, running to several web pages each. However, I’ll also devote single pages to briefer coverage of eternalistic psychotherapeutic ideology, non-theistic Buddhist eternalism, and UFO cults.

Atheism: a good first step

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There is no God. I take that as given.

But atheism (and naturalism, and rationalism, and skepticism) are only the first step toward freeing ourselves from a host of similar, ubiquitous, harmful, mistaken ideas about meaning.

Most of the harm done by religion is not due to supernatural beliefs, but due to the eternalist↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎. Non-supernatural eternalist systems are equally false and have the same malign emotional dynamics.

Atheists (particularly new ones) are especially susceptible to non-theistic eternalism, because of the experience of groundlessness when the supposed source of meaning↗︎︎ is removed.

Then it is highly tempting to find some other ultimate source of meaning, as a bulwark against nihilism↗︎︎. In the next several pages, I’ll discuss several non-theistic alternatives to God, which are just as harmful.

Belief in belief

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People take for granted that they, and others, have beliefs—and that there is a non-problematic fact-of-the-matter about what they do and don’t believe. This is wrong; belief and beliefs are nebulous↗︎︎.

Eternalism↗︎︎’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control depend on belief in belief, and on knowledge as “justified true belief.” This is especially true for rationalist eternalisms, which descend from both Protestant and Enlightenment dualistic↗︎︎ misunderstandings of belief as definite, non-nebulous entities.

Dan Kahan↗︎︎ (among others) has done good recent work on clarifying how “belief” works in the wild.

How space aliens make everything meaningful

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UFO cults are a great counter-example to the rationalist assumption that religion’s faults stem from supernaturalism. UFO cults have all the same faults as other religions, but make only naturalistic claims. Naturally-occurring space aliens substitute for the gods and demons of supernatural religions.

Of course, these space aliens don’t exist, any more than gods and demons do. But that is exactly the point: the problem with religions is not that they are supernatural, but that they are wrong. And actually even that is not the problem. The problem is that they are harmful, because they are eternalistic↗︎︎. UFO cults, and alien abduction beliefs, are just as eternalistic as the big monotheisms; and that is why they mess people up.

Because they are so similar to primitive polytheisms, and so simple and familiar in their beliefs, UFO cults are a great case study in naturalistic eternalism. That makes them a useful background example for more sophisticated non-supernatural eternalisms.

Particularly, I’ll draw an analogy between UFO cults and singularitarianism↗︎︎. In some versions, singularitarianism is closely parallel to Christianity, with the supernatural God replaced with a hypothetical superintelligent computer program. Singularitarianism is a rationalist eternalist religion. It’s much more sophisticated than UFO cults, but structurally similar.

The emotional dynamics of specialness is a central feature of space alien beliefs (and of singularitarianism). Space aliens make contact with only a few humans. Because the aliens are superintelligent, they must have selected them for extremely good reasons. Even though space aliens perform sadistic sexual torture experiments on most contactees, those must have been very special people to have been chosen for the ordeal. Most are otherwise exceptionally ordinary people, with no obvious outstanding qualities. Their selection by UFO aliens validates their existence in a way that nothing else could.

One useful source is Susan A. Clancy’s Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens↗︎︎. From a review in Scientific American:

The book explains how individuals can have memories of events that never occurred and describes the types of people who are more likely to become believers. In a nutshell, they are fantasy-prone and are often unhappy and trying to make sense of their lives. The abduction provides a touchstone. At the very end, and with obvious reluctance, Clancy concludes that abduction beliefs provide “the same things that millions of people the world over derive from their religions: meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality, transformation.”

Rationalist ideologies as eternalism

Rationalist eternalism is the confused stance↗︎︎ that there is a pattern↗︎︎ to everything, that all patterns can be discovered by reasoning, and that they give everything meaning. The universe is rational, and so rationality can master it. This stance is wrong and harmful, just as other eternalisms↗︎︎ are.

Rationality, understood and used properly, is a good thing. In the everyday sense, it is wise to think clearly and to act sensibly. My criticism of rationalist eternalism does not reject reason for emotionalism, or for some sort of anti-rational spirituality. I think anti-rational stances are also wrong and harmful. (I’ll analyze their faults later, in the chapter on monism↗︎︎, and in the discussion of the anti-rationalism of the 1960s-80s countercultures.)

In addition to good common sense, there are technical methods of reasoning that can be importantly useful sometimes. I will criticize their misuse, but I value technical rationality itself.

My argument against eternalist rationality is that reasoning does not, in fact, provide explanations or meanings for everything. Reality is nebulous↗︎︎, so that is impossible.

The exaggerated claims of ideological rationality are obviously and undeniably false, and are predictably harmful—just as with all eternalism. Yet they are so attractive—to a certain sort of person—that they are also irresistible.

Rationality and the Big Three stance combinations

The actual basis for rationalistic distortion is not eternalism. The root distortion is dualism↗︎︎, as I use the term in this book. Dualism, in this sense, is the insistence on boundaries; that everything must be definitely this or that, and not vaguely in-between.

The methods of rationality require specific categories. If you keep in mind that all categories are partially-arbitrary, artificial constructions, and cannot fully capture reality, the distortions they create may not cause problems. Ideological rationality tries to force reality to fit categories—and that does not end well.

It might make better sense to postpone discussion of rationality into the chapter on dualism. However, ideological rationality is such an important form of eternalism that I want to cover it here.

You may recall that there are three main stance combinations: dualist eternalism, monist eternalism, and dualist nihilism. Monist eternalism is anti-rational, because rationality depends on specifics, and monism denies specifics.

Both eternalism and nihilism↗︎︎ are compatible with rationalism, and in practice rationalists tend to swing between the two. Actually, everyone tends to swing between the two, but for rationalists the alternation is often extreme and violent. That’s because clear thinking easily reveals the defects in both eternalism and nihilism. I will cover nihilist rationalism (or rationalization) later. And I will return to rationalism for further analysis in the dualism chapter.

Methods of rationality

You may have little interest in the technical methods of rationality, because you believe you understand their limits and faults and harms. You might even be a bit smug about that—but if you don’t understand in detail how formal rationality works, you are probably partly mistaken. You are probably, without knowing it, under the sway of Romanticism—an anti-rational eternalist ideology that is just as bad. Also, you are missing out on a good thing.

The methods of rationality are powerfully useful, and everyone should learn them, I think. As with all power tools, such as chainsaws, you also need to learn suitable safety procedures. The problem with rationality is not that it is technical. The problem is not anything about the methods themselves. The problem is metaphysical claims about the power of the methods to explain the unexplainable.

The pages in this section are somewhat technical. They are meant mainly for those who know at least a little about methods of formal reasoning. My intention is to point out potential dangers (ways rationality can distort into eternalism) and antidotes (ways to avoid sliding toward eternalism, or to escape from it when you find you have fallen in).

Wrong-way reductions

WRONG WAY sign

Wrong-way reduction is a logical fallacy no one seems to have pointed out before.1 Regular people rarely make this error on their own. It’s common for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and theologians. The wrong-way reductions made by these professionals escape into the general culture, and cause trouble for everyone else.

A wrong-way reduction is emotionally attractive when you have a problem that is nebulous↗︎︎—complicated, messy, and ambiguous. A wrong-way reduction claims to replace that with a simple, tidy, clear-cut problem. What’s wrong is that the new problem is harder than your original one—or even impossible! For a wrong-way reduction to seem useful, you must ignore this, and take the possibility of solving the new problem as a matter of faith.

The next page explains that most or all eternalist↗︎︎ systems↗︎︎ depend on wrong-way reductions. Eternalism denies↗︎︎ nebulosity↗︎︎, and tries to use wrong-way reduction as a way to sweep nebulosity under the rug.

This is particularly common and obvious in rationalist eternalism. I will explore several examples in following pages, including logicism↗︎︎, Bayesianism, and utilitarianism.

Reduction, the right way

One problem reduces to another if the second problem is easier, and a solution for the second is most of a solution for the first.2

An informal example: Suppose you want to get from your home in rural California to Athens, Georgia. There are many ways you could do that, some harder than others. Most of this problem can be solved by taking an airplane from San Francisco to Atlanta. This leaves only the easier problems of getting to and from the airports. What’s “reduced” here is the difficulty of the journey.

A more technical example (which you can skip): the best way↗︎︎ to find the least common multiple of two numbers is to reduce the problem to finding their greatest common denominator. For two numbers x and y, LCM(x, y) = xy ÷ GCD(x, y). There are efficient ways to find the GCD. There are other ways to find the LCM, but they are less efficient than finding the GCD and multiplying.

Reduction, the wrong way

A wrong-way reduction transforms an easier problem into a harder one.

An example: Suppose you want to predict the outcome of a sportsball game. One approach would be to try to predict the number of goals that will be scored by each team. Then you could simply compare the two numbers to see which is greater.

This reduction goes the wrong way, because it is much easier to predict who will win the game than to predict exact scores.

Metaphysically motivated wrong-way reductions

Why would anyone make this sort of mistake?

If you wrongly believe that the second problem is easier than the first, this is not a logical fallacy. It’s an honest error of fact.

However, wrong-way reductions are often motivated errors, driven by wrong metaphysical attitudes. Often wrong-way reductions are advocated by people who know that the second problem is harder—or even impossible!

Wrong-way reductions are usually motivated by eternalism↗︎︎, the denial of nebulosity↗︎︎. Eternalists are unwilling to accept the inherent messiness, ambiguity, and uncertainty of life. Eternalists try to turn messy, ambiguous, and uncertain (but workable) problems into tidy, clear, certain ones—even when those are entirely insoluble.

Here’s an example. Divine command ethics↗︎︎ turns the difficult problem of choosing how to act into the impossible problem of knowing God’s will. Ethics gets messy when different ethical considerations point in different directions in a single situation. Then it may appear that God has given contradictory instructions. How then to resolve the ambiguity? Honest theologians admit—when pushed hard enough—that it may be impossible to know what God wants then.

To cope with the cognitive dissonance of relying on the impossible to cope with the merely difficult, eternalists produce evasions, obfuscations, and denials. These boil down to an “if”: if we knew what God wanted, then that would be a simple, infallible guide to correct action. The fact that we don’t know gets passed over quickly, hoping you won’t notice.

This example is slightly contrived, mainly because divine command ethics has so many other defects that knowing God’s will gets barely mentioned in discussions of this ethical approach. I chose it because it’s so simple and so obviously unworkable.

The next several pages explore more sophisticated, non-theistic examples of the same pattern.

  • 1. This seems odd. Have I missed something?
  • 2. Here I am using “reduction” as it is used in mathematics, not as it is used in the philosophy of science. The other sense of “reduction” involves explaining a material phenomenon in terms of an understanding about another, “lower level” one. Most scientific reductions are not mathematical ones.

Eternalisms as wrong-way reductions

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An eternalism↗︎︎ is a belief system based on some eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ that supposedly gives everything a definite meaning. It can be useful to look at eternalisms as wrong-way reductions: they turn somewhat-difficult problems into more difficult (or impossible) ones.

Obviously, wrong-way reduction is worse than useless. However, it can be emotionally compelling, as a way to deny↗︎︎ nebulosity↗︎︎. The aim is to turn a messy problem into a tidy one. Rationalists are particularly averse to mess, and may be willing to overlook the fact that the new tidy problem is provably insoluble.

In religious eternalisms, the ordering principle (often personified as God) is supposed to act autonomously. In that case, one can imagine the principle fulfilling eternalism’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control without humans having to do the work. This is not a wrong-way reduction; it “reduces” a hard problem to maintaining faith, which is easier (although ineffective).

In a rationalist eternalism, certainty, understanding, and control must be available to us directly. And so we must be able to get certainty, understanding, control of the principle itself, by rational means. For example, utilitarianism is supposed to deliver certainty, understanding, and control of ethics, through mathematical calculation.

Unfortunately, the utilitarian calculations are more difficult than effective moral reasoning, so this is a wrong-way reduction. More generally, in other rationalist eternalisms, the problem of accessing the eternal ordering principle is more difficult than solving the practical problems the eternalism is supposed to address. In fact, in each case, it is outright impossible—and has to be.

Rationalist eternalism promises to eliminate nebulosity, so it is attractive when nebulosity is unattractive. However, nebulosity is a brute fact that cannot be eliminated; and so no eternal ordering principle can exist. Rationalist eternalism fails precisely because of its attractive promise.

The rationalist eternalist proposition is: “If we can just eliminate nebulosity using math, then solving the actual problem will be easy, at least in principle.” But mathematics can’t eliminate nebulosity, so this is always a wrong-way reduction.

Logic as eternalism

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Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege↗︎︎, 1848–1925, invented modern logic

Logic was the main theory of rationality for thousands of years. It is now discredited and abandoned; quaint and decayed; so perhaps it is not so important to write about.

I devoted years of my youth to logic, and I remain fond of it, despite having assisted Brutus in its assassination, and even drawing a little blood myself in its final moments. So I will discuss it here, and in many other places in Meaningness; not altogether seriously, but with a mixture of nostalgia and historical distance, contempt and affection. In particular, I cover the failures of formal logic in detail in Part One of In The Cells of the Eggplant.

As a species of eternalism↗︎︎, logic is a wrong-way reduction. It replaces difficult problems of practical reasoning with the impossible problem of logical deduction.

The continuum gambit

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The continuum gambit is a mathematical approach to eternalism↗︎︎—the denial↗︎︎ of nebulosity↗︎︎. When it becomes obvious that things are not either this or that, but somewhat both and neither—a typical manifestation of nebulosity—the continuum gambit suggests that reality is a matter of shades of gray, corresponding to numbers on a continuous scale.

Often, modeling a phenomenon as a continuum works well. Often, it’s actively misleading instead. Even when it works well in practice, a continuum is rarely (if ever) how the phenomenon actually works.

The continuum gambit attempts to preserve eternalism in the face of nebulosity by confusing a mathematical model with reality.

For example, probability theory models uncertainty with a continuum, thereby attempting to regain certainty at a meta level, and to reassert optimal control with decision theory. As a practical tool, probability theory is sometimes extremely effective—and sometimes totally useless. (“Knightian uncertainty” is not amenable to probabilistic modeling.)

Bayesianism is the eternalistic insistence that probability theory is always applicable, and even that it is a complete account of rationality or epistemology. (“Probability theory does not extend logic” is a technical refutation of one of the sources of this delusion.)

Fuzzy set theory applies the continuum gambit to the problem of the nebulosity of categories. (Nebulous categories will be a major topic in the dualism chapter.) Whereas probability theory is often at least useful in practice, fuzzy set theory fails almost completely.

(I cover the failures of Bayesianism and of fuzzy set theory in detail in Part One of In The Cells of the Eggplant.)

Similarly, utilitarianism attempts to dispel the nebulosity↗︎︎ of ethics using the continuum gambit. This can’t work, and doesn’t.

Bayesianism is an eternalism

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Bayesianism is a rationalist ideology that attempts to rescue eternalism↗︎︎’s promise of certainty, in the face of nebulosity↗︎︎, with probability theory. This is an instance of the continuum gambit. It is a wrong-way reduction inasmuch as it requires you to somehow assign a real number to every possible hypothesis, which is much more difficult than actually effective ways of dealing with uncertainty.

It is widely noted that Bayesianism operates as a quasi-religious cult. This is not just my personal hobby-horse.

Debunking Bayesianism is a complex, technical subject. I’ve refuted one of its specific mistaken claims in “Probability theory does not extend logic.” I’ve made some more general, off-hand, preliminary remarks here and in “How to think real good.”

To deflect some classes of possible objections from Bayesians:

  • I will not take any position on the truth of Bayesian vs. frequentist metaphysics.
  • I will not take any position on the usefulness of Bayesian vs. frequentist statistical methods.
  • I will not argue that Bayesian methods are not sometimes useful in practice.

None of those are relevant. The point, rather, is that Bayesianism promises meta-certainty, but cannot deliver.

I cover the failures of Bayesianism in detail in Part One of In The Cells of the Eggplant. As of the most recent time I updated this page, only one relevant chapter of that has been published, “The probability of green cheese.”

Probability theory does not extend logic

The Hunting of the Snark

The marriage of empiricism and rationality

Mainstream epistemology—the theory of how we can know things—has two principles: empiricism and rationality. “Empiricism” means that knowledge is based on perception; “rationality” means that knowledge is based on sound reasoning.

Not so long ago, there were believed to be other bases for reliable knowledge: tradition, scripture, and intuition. All five of these competed with each of the others. So rationalists and empiricists were enemies, and it seemed both could not be right. However, in the late 1800s, rationalism and empiricism allied, and killed the other three. The two joined in the holy matrimony of the Scientific Worldview.

This marriage seems happy enough. Indeed, it’s obvious to any working scientist that both are indispensable. It is little-noticed that no contract was drawn up, and the terms of the union are undefined. Perhaps this is a motivated ignorance; why risk upset?

Dropping the flowery metaphors: we have no coherent explanation for how rationality and empiricism relate to each other—even though philosophers have worked hard to find one for several centuries. I find this mysterious and exciting, because I suspect that neither rationality nor empiricism is a good account of knowledge, separately or combined. That opens the possibility for alternative, more accurate explanations.

That is a big topic. This page concentrates on one small aspect: the relationships among mathematical logic, probability theory, and rationality in general. (A terminological point: confusingly, reasoning and empiricism are now often referred to together as “rationality.”) Mathematical logic is the modern, formal version of rationality in the narrow sense, and probability theory is the modern, formal version of empiricism.

It is sometimes said that probability theory extends mathematical logic from dealing with just “true” and “false” to a continuous scale of uncertainty. Some have said that this is proven by Cox’s Theorem. These are both misunderstandings, as I’ll explain below. In short: logic is capable of expressing complex relationships among different objects, and probability theory is not.

A more serious corollary misunderstanding is that probability theory is a complete theory of formal rationality; or even of rationality in general; or even of epistemology.

In fact, logic can do things probability theory can’t. However, despite much hard work, no known formalism completely unifies the two! Even at the mathematical level, the marriage of rationality and empiricism has never been fully consummated.

Furthermore, probability theory plus logic cannot exhaust rationality—much less add up to a complete epistemology. I’ll end with a very handwavey sketch of how we might make progress toward one.

Plan

I hope to dispel misunderstandings by comparing the expressive power of three formal systems. In reverse order:

  • Predicate calculus—the usual meaning of “logic”—can describe relationships among multiple objects.
  • Aristotelian logic can describe only the properties of a single object.
  • Propositional calculus cannot talk about objects at all.

Probability theory can be viewed as an extension of propositional calculus. Propositional calculus is described as “a logic,” for historical reasons, but it is not what is usually meant by “logic.”

Cox’s Theorem concerns only propositional calculus. Further, it was well-known long before Cox that probability theory does extend propositional calculus.

Informally, probability theory can extend Aristotelian logic as well. This is usually unproblematic in practice, although it squicks logicians a bit.

Probability theory by itself cannot express relationships among multiple objects, as predicate calculus (i.e. “logic”) can. The two systems are typically combined in scientific practice. In specific cases, this is intuitive and unproblematic. In general, it is difficult and an open research area.

These misunderstandings probably originate with E. T. Jaynes. More about that toward the end of this page.

“Expressive power” is about what a system allows you to say. A possible objection to probability theory as an account of rationality is that it is too expensive to compute with. This essay is not about that problem. Even if all computation were free, probability theory could not reason about relationships, because it can’t even represent them.1

Propositional calculus

Propositional calculus is the mathematics of “and,” “or,” and “not.” (“Calculus” here has nothing to do with the common meaning of “calculus” as the mathematics of continuous change: derivatives and integrals.) There is not much to say about “and,” “or,” and “not,” and not much you can do with them. (You can skip to the next section if you know this stuff.)

A “proposition,” for propositional calculus, is something that is either true or false. As far as this system is concerned, there is nothing more to a proposition than that. Particularly, propositional calculus is never concerned with what a proposition is about. It is only concerned with what happens when you combine propositions with “and,” “or,” and “not.” It symbolizes these three with ∧, ∨, and ¬, respectively.

So let’s consider some particular proposition, which we’ll call p. All we can say about it is that it is either true or false. Regarding ¬, we can say that if p is true, then ¬p is false. Also, if p is false, then ¬p is true. Thus endeth the disquisition upon negation. (Perhaps you are not enthralled so far.)

Consider two propositions, p and q. If both p and q are true, then p∧q is true. If either of them is false, then p∧q is false. (Surprised?) That’s all that can be said about ∧.

You’ll be shocked to learn that if either p or q is true, then p∨q is true; but if both of them are false, then p∨q is false.

From these profound insights, we can prove some important theorems. For example, it can be shown that p∧¬p is false, regardless of whether p is true or false. (You may wish to check this carefully.)

Likewise, it can be shown that p∨¬p is true, regardless of whether p is true or false. In other exciting news, it turns out that p∧p is true if p is true, and false if not. Moreover, p∧q is true if, and only if, q∧p is true!

There are a half dozen banalities of this sort in total; and they exhaust the expressive power of propositional calculus.

Propositional calculus and “logic”

Propositional calculus is extremely important; it’s the rock bottom foundation for all of mathematics. But by itself, it’s also extremely weak. It’s useful to understand only for its role in more powerful systems.

Propositional calculus can’t talk about anything. As far as it knows, propositions are just true or false; they have no meaning beyond that.

The grade school example of logic is this syllogism:

(a) All men are mortal.

(b) Socrates is a man.

Therefore:

(c) Socrates is mortal.

We can capture the “therefore” in propositional calculus.2 Its symbol is →. It turns out that p→q is equivalent to (¬p)∨q. (You may need to think that through if you aren’t familiar with it. Consider each of the cases of p and q being true and false. If p is true, then ¬p is false, so q has to be true to make (¬p)∨q true. If p isn’t true, then ¬p is true, and then it doesn’t matter whether q is true or false.)

So we could try to write the syllogism, in propositional calculus, as (a∧b)→c. But this is not a valid deduction in propositional calculus. As far as it knows, a, b, and c are all independent, because it has no idea what any of them mean. The fact that a and b are both about men, and b and c are both about Socrates, is beyond the system’s ken.

For this calculus, propositions are “atomic” or “opaque.” You aren’t allowed to look at their internal structure. Propositional calculus has no numbers; no individuals, no properties, no relationships; nothing except true, false, and, or, and not. Most important, it has no way of reasoning from generalizations (“all men are mortal”) to specifics (“Socrates is mortal”).3

For historical reasons, propositional calculus is described as “a logic,” and is sometimes called “propositional logic.” But it is not what mathematicians or philosophers mean when they talk about “logic.” They mean predicate calculus, a different and immensely more powerful system.

Probability theory extends propositional calculus

Probability theory can easily be seen as an extension of propositional calculus to deal with uncertainty. In fact, the axiomatic foundations of the two were developed in concert, in the mid–1800s, by Boole↗︎︎ and Venn↗︎︎ among others. It was obvious then that the two are closely linked.

This section sketches the way probability theory extends propositional calculus, in case you are unfamiliar with the point. You can skip ahead if you already know this.

Probabilities are numbers from 0 to 1, where 1 means “certainly yes,” 0 means “certainly no,” and numbers in between represent degrees of uncertainty. When probability theory is applied in the real world, probabilities are assigned to various sorts of things, like hypotheses and events; but the math doesn’t specify that. As far as the math is concerned, there are just various thingies that have probabilities, and it has nothing to say about the thingies themselves. Just as in propositional calculus, probability theory doesn’t let you “look inside” them. In fact, one common way of applying probability theory is to say that the thingies are, indeed, propositions.

An event is something that either happens, or doesn’t. If e is an event, we symbolize its probability as P(e). We can symbolize the other possibility—that e doesn’t happen—as ¬e. It is certain that either e or ¬e will happen, so P(e) + P(¬e) = 1. Rearranging, P(¬e) = 1 – P(e). If e is certain, then P(e) = 1, so P(¬e) = 0, i.e. certainly false.

Suppose f is another event, which can happen only if e doesn’t happen. For example, if e is a die coming up 3, and f is the die coming up 4, then they are mutually exclusive. In that case, P(e∨f), the probability that the die comes up either 3 or 4, is P(e)+P(f). (For a six-sided die, that is 1/6+1/6=1/3.)

Suppose two events are “independent”: approximately, there is no causal connection between them. For example, two dice rolling should not affect each other. Let’s say e is the first die coming up 3, and g is the second one coming up 3. In that case, the probability that they will both come up 3, P(e∧g) = P(e) × P(g), which is 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/36.4

What is the probability that at least one die comes up 3? These are not mutually exclusive, so it is not simply the sum. It is P(e∨g) = P(e) + P(g) – P(e∧g), or 1/3 – 1/36. “At least one” includes “both,” and we have to subtract that out.

So, taken together, we see a simple and intuitive connection between probability and the operations of propositional calculus.

Cox’s Theorem

Cox’s Theorem concerns this relationship between propositional calculus and probability theory. It is irrelevant to the question “does probability theory extend logic” because:

  1. Propositional calculus is not “logic” as that is usually understood.
  2. It was well-known for decades before Cox that probability theory does extend propositional calculus.5

So you can probably just skip the rest of this section. However, since some people have misunderstood Cox’s Theorem as proving that probability theory includes all of logic, and is therefore a complete theory of rationality, I’ll say a little more about it.

Cox’s Theorem was an attempt to answer the informal question: Is there something like probability theory, but not quite the same?

This sort of question is often paradigm-breaking in mathematics. Is there something like Euclid’s geometry, but not quite the same? Yes, there are non-Euclidian geometries; and they turn out to be the mathematical key to Einsteinian relativity. Are there things that are like real numbers but not quite the same? Yes; complex numbers, for example, which have endless applications in pure mathematics, physics, and engineering.

So if there were something like probability theory, but not the same, we’d want to know about it. It might be extremely useful, in unexpected ways. Or, it might just be a mathematical curiosity.

Alternatively, if we knew that there is nothing similar to probability theory, then we’d have more confidence that using it is justified. We know probability theory often gives good results; if there’s nothing else like it, then we don’t have to worry that some other method would give better ones.

To answer the question, we need to say precisely what “like” would mean. (Probate law is “like” probability theory in some ways, but not ones we care about.) One approach is to define “what probability theory is like”; and then we can ask “are there other things that are like that?” So, what properties of probability theory are important enough that anything “like” it ought to have them?

This is not a mathematical question; it’s just a matter of opinion. Different people have different, reasonable opinions about what’s important about probability theory. The answer to “is there anything else like probability theory?” comes out differently depending on what properties you think something else would have to have to count as “like.”

When Cox was writing, in the 1940s, definitely nothing “like” probability theory was known. So he wanted to prove that indeed this would remain true.

Probably everyone would agree that anything “like” probability theory has to be a method for reasoning about uncertainty. So Cox started by asking: what would everyone intuitively agree has to be true about any sane method? For one thing, everyone would agree that in cases of certainty, any method ought to accord with propositional calculus; and that in cases of near-certainty, it ought to nearly accord. So, for instance, if q is nearly certain, then q∨p should also be nearly certain.

So Cox’s plan was to start with a handful of such intuitions, and show that probability theory is the only system that satisfies them. And, he thought he had done that.

Unfortunately, there are technical, philosophical, and practical problems with his result. I will mention some of these, but only briefly—because the whole topic is irrelevant to my point.

Technically, Cox’s proof was simply wrong, and the “Theorem” as stated is not true. Various technical fixes have been proposed, yielding revised, accurate theorems with similar content.

Philosophically, it is unclear that all his requirements were intuitive. For example, the proof requires negation to be a twice-differentiable function. Some authors do not consider twice-differentiability an “intuitive” property of negation; others do.

It is also controversial what the (fixed-up) mathematical result means philosophically. Whereas in 1946, when Cox published his Theorem, there clearly was nothing else like probability theory, there are now a variety of related mathematical systems↗︎︎ for reasoning about uncertainty.

These share a common motivation. Probability theory doesn’t work when you have inadequate information. Implicitly, it demands that you always have complete confidence in your probability estimate,6 like maybe 0.5279371, whereas in fact often you just have no clue. Or you might say “well, it seems the probability is at least 0.3, and not more than 0.8, but any guess more definite than that would be meaningless.”

So various systems try to capture this intuition: sometimes a specific numerical probability is unavailable, but you can still do some reasoning anyway. These systems coincide with probability theory in cases where you are confident of your probability estimate, and extend it to handle cases where you aren’t.

Some advocates of probability theory point to Cox’s Theorem as reason to dismiss alternatives. Is that justified? It is not a mathematical reason; the alternatives are valid as mathematical systems. It’s a philosophical claim that depends on intuitions that reasonable people disagree about.

Practically, what we want to know is: are there times when we should use one of the alternatives, instead of probability theory?

This is an empirical, engineering question, not a mathematical one. I have no expertise in this area, but from casual reading, the answer seems to be “no.” Successful applications seem to be rare or non-existent. When probability theory doesn’t work, the other leading brands don’t work either. They just add complexity.

So in a practical sense, I think Cox was probably right. As far as we know, there’s nothing similar to probability theory that’s also useful in practice.7

Using probability in the real world

Probability theory is just math; but we care about it because it’s useful when applied to real-world problems. Originally, for example, it was developed to analyze gambling games.

Suppose you roll a die, and you believe it is fair. Then you believe that the probability it will come up as a three is 1/6. You could write this as P(3) = 1/6.

People write things like that all the time, and it is totally legitimate. It might make you slightly uneasy, however. 3 is a number. It’s abstract. Do numbers have probabilities? Not as such. You assign 3 a probability, in this particular context. In a different context—for example, rolling an icosahedral die↗︎︎—it would have a different probability.

There is always a process of intelligent interpretation between a mathematical statement and the real world. This interpretation gives mathematics “aboutness.” What, in the real world, do the mathematical entities refer to? Here, you understand that “3” corresponds to whether a die has come up three or not.

This interpretation is not merely mental; it is a bodily process of action and perception. You have learned to roll a die in a way that makes its outcome sufficiently random8; and you can count the number of pips on a die face.9 The usefulness of any mathematics depends on such interpretive processes working reliably.

“3” is ambiguous, as we saw. In this simple case, you know what it refers to, and won’t get confused. But someone else might read your observation that “P(3) = 1/6” and try to apply it to an icosahedral die; in which case they might make bad bets. So when communicating with others, or in more complicated cases where you might lose track yourself, you would want to be more explicit.

What exactly did “P(3) = 1/6” mean? Maybe it’s “this particular die, now rolling, has probability 1/6 of coming up with a three.” Or maybe you have a more general belief: “any fair six-sided die has probability 1/6 of coming up three any time it is rolled.” So then, to avoid ambiguity, you could write:

P(any fair six-sided die coming up three any time it is rolled) = 1/6

This has a high ratio of English to math, however. English is notoriously ambiguous. Quite possibly there’s still room for misinterpretation. It might be better to write this in a way that is purely mathematical, so there’s no ambiguity left.

Modern mathematical logic was developed as a way to do exactly that. Logicians wanted a systematic way of turning English statements into unambiguous mathematical ones. The system they invented is called predicate calculus.

It is now the meta-language of mathematics. All math can (in principle) be expressed in predicate calculus. It is immensely more powerful than propositional calculus. Its key trick—which is necessary to express generalizations like “any six-sided die”—is called logical quantification.

But before we get to that, let’s look at a simpler system, Aristotelian logic; and look at how probability theory can more-or-less handle Aristotelian generalization.

Implicit generalizations

Aristotelian logic allows us to make general statements about the properties of particular, single objects. The standard example is “all men are mortal.” The Aristotelian syllogism allows us to reason from general to specific statements. For example, if we know that Socrates is a specific man, then we can conclude that Socrates is mortal.

How does this relate to probability theory? “All men are mortal” is usually considered certain, so it’s not a good example for answering that.

Instead: the logician C. L. Dodgson↗︎︎ demonstrated↗︎︎ that some snarks—not all—are boojums. A probabilist may write this generalization as a conditional probability:

P(boojum|snark) = 0.4

The vertical bar | is read “given”. The statement is understood as something like “if you see a snark, the probability that it is a boojum is 0.4.” Or, “the probability of boojumness given snarkness is 0.4.”

Mathematicians would call this “an abuse of notation”; but if it is interpreted intelligently in context, it’s unproblematic. Still, it’s rather queer. What exactly are “snark” and “boojum” supposed to mean here?

A probability textbook will tell you that the things that get probabilities are events or hypotheses or outcomes or propositions. (Different authors disagree.) We could legitimately say

P(Edward is a boojum|Edward is a snark) = 0.4

because “Edward is a snark” is a proposition. But this is a specific fact, and we want to express a generalization about snarks broadly.

“Snark” and “boojum” refer to categories, or properties; and those don’t get probabilities. In this context, they are meant to be read as something like “this thing is a snark” (or boojum). A more pedantically correct statement would be:

P(it is a boojum|something is a snark) = 0.4

But again this doesn’t look like math; and what does “this” mean?10 How are we sure that the “something” that is a snark refers to the same thing as the “it” that might be a boojum? Someone might read this, observe that Carlotta is a snark, and conclude that there’s a 0.4 probability that Edward is a boojum. That is not a deduction the equation was supposed to allow. We’re depending on intelligent interpretation. We’ll see that this could become arbitrarily difficult, and therefore unreliable, in more complex cases.

Formally, a Bayesian network↗︎︎ is a set of specific conditional probabilities. In practice, by abuse of notation and intelligent application, it is used to express a set of generalizations. For example:

P(snark|hairy) = 0.01

P(boojum|snark) = 0.4

P(lethal|boojum) = 0.9

Implicitly, “hairy,” “snark,” “boojum,” and “lethal” are all meant to refer to the same creature—whichever that happens to be in the situation at hand.

So long as this implicit reference works out, probability theory can in practice capture Aristotelian logic: generalizations about properties of a single object.11 Mathematical formulations of probability theory don’t support that, but there’s usually no practical problem.

However, Aristotelian logic is weak; it doesn’t let you talk about relationships among objects. Let’s shine some light on an example.

There’s other scary monsters out there. Grues, for example. If you explore a cave in the dark, you are likely to be eaten by one.

P(grue|cave) = 0.7

P(grue|dark) = 0.8

P(eaten|grue) = 0.9

This example is different. “Cave” does not refer to the same thing as “grue”! Again, with intelligent interpretation, this may not be a problem. The statements were intended to mean something like:

P(there is some grue nearby|I am in cave) = 0.7

P(there is some grue nearby|the cave is dark) = 0.8

P(that nearby grue will eat me|there is a grue nearby) = 0.9

English is carrying too much of the load here, however. It’s someone’s job to keep track of grues and caves and “I”s and make sure they are all in the right relationships. The conditional probability formalism is not able to do that.12

Logical quantification

Predicate calculus has an elegant, general way of talking about relationships: logical quantifiers. They are the solution here.

A simplest use cleans up the vagueness of “P(boojum|snark) = 0.4.” We’re supposed to interpret that as: anything that is a snark has probability 0.4 of being a boojum. In predicate calculus,

∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4

“∀” is read “for all,” and the thing that comes after it is a place holder variable that could stand for anything. So this means “for anything at all—call it x—the probability that x is a boojum, given that x is snark, is 0.4.”

So ∀ is doing two pieces of work for us. One is that it lets us make an explicitly general statement. “P(boojum|snark) = 0.4” was implicitly meant to apply to all monsters, but that worked only “by abuse of notation”; you can’t actually do that in formal probability theory.

∀’s second trick is to allow us to reason from generalities to specifics—the Aristotelian syllogism. This is done by “binding” the variable x to a particular value, such as Edward. From

∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4

we are allowed to logically deduce

P(boojum(Edward)|snark(Edward)) = 0.4

(This operation is called “instantiation” of the general statement.)

There are two logical quantifiers, ∀ and ∃. The second one gets read “there exists.” For example,

∃x: father(x, Edward)

“There exists some x such that x is Edward’s father”—or, more naturally, “Something is Edward’s father,” or “Edward has a father.”

The power of predicate calculus comes when we combine two or more quantifiers in a single statement, one nested inside another.13 Because each quantifier has its own variable, we can use them to relate two or more things.

Fatherhood is a relationship. Every vertebrate has a father.14

∀x: vertebrate(x) → (∃y: father(y, x))

From this, if we also know that Edward is a vertebrate, we can deduce that he has a father.15

Probably, every vertebrate has exactly one father:

∀x: vertebrate(x) → (∃y: father(y, x) ∧ (∀z: father(z, x) → z=y))

“If x is a vertebrate, then it has some father (y), and if anything (z) is x’s father, it’s actually just y.”

Do you believe that? I was sure of it until I thought a bit. If two sperm fertilize an egg at almost the same instant, maybe it’s possible (if very unlikely) that during the first mitosis, the excess paternal chromosomes will get randomly dumped, leaving daughter cells with a normal karyotype composed of a mixture of chromosomes from the two fathers. For all I know, this does happen occasionally in fish or something. Or maybe it just can’t happen, because vertebrate eggs have a reliable mechanism to detect a wrong karyotype, and abort.16

We’d like to bring evidence to bear—evidence that (like all real-world evidence) cannot be certain. Suppose we sequence DNA from some monsters and find that it sure looks like Arthur and Harold are both fathers of Edward:

P(father(Arthur, Edward) | experiment) = 0.99

P(father(Harold, Edward) | experiment) = 0.99

P(Arthur = Harold | observations) = 0.01

This should update our belief that every vertebrate has only one father. How?

Here we would be reasoning from specifics to generalities (whereas the implicit instantiation trick of Bayesian networks allows us to reason from generalities to specifics). This is outside the scope of probability theory.

Statistical inference↗︎︎ is based on probability theory, and enables reasoning from specifics to generalities in some cases. It is not just probability theory, though; and it handles only simple, restricted cases; and it doesn’t relate to predicate calculus in any straightforward way.

Back to the cave:

∀x: ∀y: P(∃z: grue(z) ∧ near(z,x) | person(x) ∧ cave(y) ∧ in(x, y)) = 0.8

“If a person (x) is in a cave (y), then the probability that there’s a grue (z) near the person is 0.8.” Most of what is going on this statement is predicate logic, not probability. Remember that for probability theory, propositions are opaque and atomic. As far as it is concerned, “person(x) ∧ cave(y) ∧ in(x, y)” is just a long name for an event that is either observed or not; and so likewise “∃z: grue(z) ∧ near(z,x).” It can’t “look inside” to see that we’re talking about three different things and their relationships.

In practice, probability theory is often combined with other mathematical methods (such as predicate logic in this case). Probabilists mostly don’t even notice they are doing this. When they use logic, they do so informally and intuitively.

The danger is that they imagine probability theory is doing the work, when in fact something else is doing the heavy lifting. This can lead to logical errors. That is common in scientific practice: the probabilistic part of the reasoning is carried out correctly, but it is “misapplied.” In routine science, “probabilistic reasoning” is usually “we ran this statistics program.” “Misapplied” means that the program was run correctly, but due to a logical error, the results don’t imply what the users thought.

Another danger is sometimes-dramatic over-estimation of what probability theory is capable of. The mistaken idea that “probability theory generalizes logic”17 led to some badly confused work in artificial intelligence, for instance. More importantly, it has also warped some accounts of the philosophy of science.

Probabilistic logic

Probability theory can’t help you reason about relationships, and that is certainly an important part of rationality. So, probability theory is not a complete theory of rationality—one of the main points of this essay.

Predicate calculus can help you reason about relationships; but by itself, it can’t help you reason about evidence. Probability, in the Bayesian interpretation, is a theory of evidence. Can we combine them to get a complete theory of rationality?

“∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4” is a statement of predicate calculus—not probability theory. As written, it is either true or false. But, maybe you aren’t sure which! In that case, you may have a probability estimate for it. And you might want to update your probability estimate given evidence.

P(∀x: P(boojum(x)|snark(x)) = 0.4 | snark(Edward)∧boojum(Edward)) = 0.8

“Given the observations that Edward is both a snark and a boojum, I now think it’s 0.8 probable that the statement ‘the probability that any snark is a boojum is 0.4’ is true.”

What exactly would that mean? How would you use it? What would that say about the probability of a particular snark being a boojum? What happens in the 0.2 probability that the statement is not true? In that case, what does it say about the probability of a particular snark being a boojum? Suppose the probability is actually 0.400001, not 0.4? Does that make the statement false?

The formula freely mixes probability theory with predicate calculus, nesting them any-which-way. There’s a P inside the scope of a ∀ inside the scope of a P. How does that work?

It turns out that, in general, no one yet has an answer to this. The field of probabilistic logic↗︎︎ concerns the question. So far, various restricted probabilistic logics have been studied, which do not allow freely mixing probabilities and logical quantifiers. Even these restricted versions can get extremely complicated, and a general theory is currently out of reach↗︎︎.18

Formal systems, rationality, and epistemology

Even if we could fully integrate probability theory and predicate calculus, together they would be far from a complete theory of rationality. They have no account of what the various bits of notation mean, and where they come from. What is “father,” and how did you come up with the idea that ∀x: vertebrate(x) → (∃y: father(y, x)) even might be true?

Logical positivism↗︎︎ was the dream that by writing things out precisely enough, in enough detail, we could get answers to such questions. It conclusively failed↗︎︎. The problem is that formalism necessarily depends on intelligent interpretation-in-action to connect it with the real world; to give it “aboutness.”19

Formal systems (such as logic and probability theory) are also only useful once you have a model. Where do those come from? I think it’s important to go about finding models in a rational way—but formal rationality has nothing to offer. (I wrote about this in “How to think real good.”)

As a further point, a complete theory of rationality—if such a thing were possible—would probably not be a complete theory of epistemology. We have very little idea what a good epistemological theory might look like, but my guess is that rationality (even in the broadest sense) would be only a small part.

Since we don’t know how people know things (the subject of epistemology), we should try to find out—empirically, and rationally! Armchair speculation has been seriously misleading. (Basing epistemology on an over-simplified fairy-tale version of Newton’s discovery of gravitation—a popular starting point—is not an empirical or rational approach, and reliably fails.) We need to actually observe people using knowledge, finding knowledge, creating knowledge. Only after much observation could we develop and test hypotheses.

In the 1980s, the “social studies of science” research program began to do this. Unfortunately, much of that was postmodern nonsense. It was marred by metaphysical and political axes that many of its practitioners wanted to grind, plus lack of understanding of the subject matter in most cases. This led to the “Science Wars↗︎︎” of the 1990s, culminating in the Sokal hoax↗︎︎, which pretty nearly killed off the field.

But this program did some valuable observational work, and made some interesting preliminary hypotheses. I’d like to see a return to careful observational study of how science (and other knowledge-generating activities) are done—this time without the ideological baggage.

Here’s one valuable generalization that came out of “social studies of science.” As I pointed out earlier, mathematical formulae are only given “aboutness” by people’s skilled, interpretive application in practical activity. The same is true of knowledge in general!

Further, most human activity is collaborative. It turns out that sometimes what I know cannot be separated from other people’s ability to make sense of it in relationship with particular situations. Making sense of knowing requires an account of the division of epistemic labor. Knowledge is often not a property of isolated individuals.20

Taking these points seriously leads to radical revisions not only in the sorts of explanations that could plausibly be part of an adequate epistemology, but also in the sorts of things it would need to explain.

Historical appendix: Where did the confusion come from?

E. T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science↗︎︎ appears to be the root source. He was completely confused about the relationship between probability theory and logic.21 There’s strong evidence that when people tried to de-confuse him, he pig-headedly refused to listen.

He wrote that probability theory forms the “uniquely valid principles of logic in general” (p. xx); and:

Our theme is simply: Probability Theory as Extended Logic. The new perception amounts to the recognition that the mathematical rules of probability theory are not merely rules for calculating frequencies of “random variables”; they are also the unique consistent rules for conducting inference (i.e. plausible reasoning) of any kind. (p. xxii)

This is simply false, as I’ve explained in this essay. How did he go wrong?

He got confused by the word “Aristotelian”—or more exactly by the word “non-Aristotelian.”

Aristotelian logic has two truth values, namely “true” and “false.” In the 1930s, there was a vogue for “non-Aristotelian logic↗︎︎,” which added other truth values. For example, a statement could be “meaningless” rather than either true or false. Non-Aristotelian logic turned out to be a dead end, and is a mostly-forgotten historical curiosity.

Predicate calculus is not Aristotelian logic, but it is not “non-Aristotelian”, either! It has only two truth values.

What’s confusing is that Aristotelian logic was extended in two different dimensions: by adding truth values (to produce non-Aristotelian logic) and by allowing nested quantifiers (to produce predicate calculus).

When someone tried to explain to Jaynes that probability theory only extends Aristotelian logic, not predicate calculus, he remembered the phrase “non-Aristotelian logic” and read about that, and (rightly) concluded it was irrelevant to his project. Then when the someone said “no, you missed the point, what matters is predicate calculus,” Jaynes just dug in his heels and refused to take that seriously.

There are several places in his book where he says this explicitly. There’s a long discussion in the section titled “Nitpicking” (p. 23). It’s an amazing expression of defiantly obstinate confusion. Well worth examining to learn linguistic signs that you are refusing to see the obvious: out of arrogance, or because you half-realize that accepting it would collapse your grandiose Theory Of Everything.

There’s another refusal on page xxviii:

Although our concern with the nature of logical inference leads us to discuss many of the same issues, our language differs greatly from the stilted jargon of logicians and philosophers. There are no linguistic tricks and there is no “meta-language” gobbledygook; only plain English… No further clarity would be achieved… with ‘What do you mean by “exists”?’

Predicate calculus is the standard “meta-language” for mathematics, and getting clear about what “exists” means was Frege’s central insight that made that possible.22

Jaynes is just saying “I don’t understand this, so it must all be nonsense.”

A Socratic dialog

Pop Bayesian (PB): Wow, I have a faster-than-light starship! [A complete theory of rationality.]

Me: That seems extremely unlikely… how does it work?

PB: It’s about five inches long and has pointy bits at one end. Look!

Me: That’s a fork. [That’s a minor generalization of propositional calculus.]

PB: No, it’s totally an FTL starship! [A complete theory of rationality!]

Me: No, it’s not.

PB: Yes it is!

Me: Look, a minimum requirement for an FTL starship is that it go faster than light. [A minimum requirement for a general theory of rationality is that it can do everything predicate calculus and everything probability theory can do.]

PB: Yeah, look! I can make it go way fast! *Throws the fork across the room, really hard.*

Me: Uh… I don’t think you understand how fast light goes [how much more powerful predicate logic is than propositional logic].

PB: I can make it go however fast! I could shoot it out of a gun, even!

Me: Um, you don’t seem to know enough physics to understand the in-principle reason you can’t accelerate ordinary objects to FTL speeds. [If you can mistake probability theory for a general theory of rationality, you must be missing the mathematical background which you’d need in order to understand why it’s a non-starter.]

After writing this, I found a delightful, similar satire of Bayesianism by Cosma Shalizi, "Solvitur ambulando↗︎︎."

  • 1. Predicate calculus is still more computationally expensive; in fact, it is provably arbitrarily expensive. I’m not advocating it as a general engineering approach to rationality either.
  • 2. Or maybe not. Since propositional calculus does not let you talk about anything, its “therefore” really isn’t the same as a common-sense “therefore.” Some people think this is important, but it’s not relevant to this essay, so let’s move on.
  • 3. E. T. Jaynes did not understand this. He was badly confused here already. He failed to understand the relationship between propositional and Aristotelian logic, much less the more complicated relationship between Aristotelian and predicate logic. In Probability Theory: The Logic of Science↗︎︎, p. 4, he claims to explain what a syllogism is, but his explanation is actually of modus ponens↗︎︎! Modus ponens is an operation of propositional logic, whereas the syllogism requires Aristotelian logic, i.e. a single universal quantifier. Jaynes did not see the distinction between the two; a very basic error.
  • 4. If the events are not independent, it’s still possible to calculate probabilities, but more complicated.
  • 5. In fact, Cox pointed this out in his 1961 book The Algebra of Probable Inference↗︎︎, quoting Boole in Footnote 5, p. 101. In this passage, Boole not only makes the connection between the frequentist and logical interpretations of probability, he suggests that it is necessary—which is the point of Cox’s Theorem.
  • 6. In the Bayesian interpretation, anyway.
  • 7. An important exception is quantum mechanics, which can be seen as↗︎︎ an extension of probability theory in which probabilities can be negative or complex numbers. (Thanks to John Costello (@joxn↗︎︎) for pointing this out.) It is not “like” probability theory in Cox’s sense, and not useful as a way of reasoning about macroscopic uncertainty, but is of great practical (engineering) and theoretical (physics) importance.
  • 8. This might seem obvious, but small children can’t do it reliably.
  • 9. Or, more accurately, you can subitize↗︎︎ them.
  • 10. Technically, “this” is an indexical↗︎︎. Mid–20th-century logicians realized that indexicals allow for implicit universal quantification—when combined with some method for instantiating, or determining the reference of, each indexical. They didn’t have much of a story about the method. One of the central innovations of the Pengi system I built with Phil Agre was using (simulated) machine vision to bind indexicals to real-world objects.
  • 11. Technically, this is not exactly what “Aristotelian logic” means; I’m skipping some fiddly details that are only of historical interest, and not relevant to this discussion.
  • 12. Here “I” and “that” are indexicals, which give implicit quantification, but “some” is an explicit quantifier. An explicit formalization of this situation requires nested quantification, and you can’t get that with just indexicals, even implicitly.
  • 13. An accurate account of nested quantification was the key to modern logic. It was developed by Gottlob Frege. To quote Wikipedia↗︎︎: “In effect, Frege invented axiomatic predicate logic, in large part thanks to his invention of quantified variables, which eventually became ubiquitous in mathematics and logic, and which solved the problem of multiple generality. Previous logic had dealt with the logical constants and, or, not, and some and all, but iterations of these operations, especially ‘some’ and ‘all’, were little understood: even the distinction between a sentence like ‘every boy loves some girl’ and ‘some girl is loved by every boy’ could be represented only very artificially, whereas Frege’s formalism had no difficulty… A frequently noted example is that that Aristotle’s logic is unable to represent mathematical statements like Euclid’s theorem, a fundamental statement of number theory that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Frege’s ‘conceptual notation’ however can represent such inferences.”
  • 14. Let’s simplify this to natural, biological fatherhood, ignoring issues of legal parenthood and laboratory genetic manipulation.
  • 15. Formally, we bind x to Edward and instantiate to get vertebrate(Edward) → (∃y: father(y, Edward)), and then apply modus ponens (implication elimination) to get ∃y: father(y, Edward).
  • 16. A few months after writing this, I learned about Tremblay’s salamander↗︎︎, an all-female species with no fathers. They are triploid, and reproduce only by self-fertilization. I read about Tremblay’s salamander in Randall Monroe’s What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions↗︎︎ which is full of fascinating factoids of this sort.
  • 17. It’s worth noting that whereas most of what you can do with logic, you can’t do with probability theory, everything you can do with probability theory, you can do with predicate calculus. You can easily axiomatize probability theory, and thereby embed the whole thing in predicate calculus.
  • 18. I find this somewhat surprising, actually, and have been tempted to dive in and see if I can solve the problem. But, looking at some examples of reasoning about probabilities of probabilities helps one see, quite quickly, why this is hard. It’s difficult to know what they mean. Interestingly, Jaynes worked on this, developing a formalism he called Ap, which I’ve discussed elsewhere↗︎︎. Ap handles only the very simplest cases (and is probably unworkable in practice for even those), but it does give some insight.
  • 19. Wittgenstein, who was partly responsible for logical positivism in the first place, diagnosed this failure clearly in his Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎. Heidegger presented much the same insight earlier in Being and Time↗︎︎, although not as clearly, and not with reference to logical positivism specifically.
  • 20. This means that the representational theory of mind, which descends from logical positivism, is unworkable. See “A billion tiny spooks.”
  • 21. He was heavily influenced by Cox’s work, which he entirely misunderstood. Cox was definitely not confused, and not to blame; he was explicit that he was discussing only the propositional calculus. Cox’s writing is delightfully informal; if you already know logic, his book is enormously entertaining. If you don’t know logic, the informality is liable to mislead you.
  • 22. Part of the obstacle to understanding nested quantifiers had been Aristotle’s misunderstanding of the existential quantifier even by itself. If you want to geek out about the history of logic, you can read about this in “The Square of Opposition↗︎︎.”

Utilitiarianism is an eternalism

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory based on the intuition that one should act to produce the most good for everyone overall. That intuition is often right. Trying to make it the sole source of ethics always fails, though. This is an example of a non-theistic, rationalist eternalist↗︎︎ error.

Utilitarianism is an accountant’s theory of morality. (It appeals especially to atheists of a technical bent.) Suppose you have to choose between two actions. If you could predict all the results of each action, and if you could figure out how good (or bad) the results would be for everyone, and if you could combine all the goods and bads into a single total number, then you could compare the totals for each action, and choose the better one. (This is an example of the continuum gambit.)

Notice the “ifs” in this story. To make utilitarianism work, you’d have to be able to:

  • predict all the effects of actions
  • assign a numerical goodness/badness of each effect on each person
  • combine these numbers into a meaningful total

Each of these tasks is quite impossible.

Utilitarianism is, therefore, a wrong-way reduction: it replaces the difficult but tractable problem of ethical decision-making with an absolutely hopeless one. This is just like the sportsball problem I discussed earlier. It is far easier to predict the winning team in a sportsball game than to predict how many goals will be made by each side.

The Other Leading Brands of ethical theory—deontology and virtue ethics—don’t require you to solve such problems. Deontology merely requires that you follow rules, and virtue ethics that you be a moral sort of person. These approaches have other dire defects, and are quite wrong. But they don’t require impossible feats of computation.

Utilitarians are undeterred. When pressed, they usually admit the impossibilities. Further, they admit that no known version of utilitarianism gives correct ethical answers even in principle, even if you could solve all the impossible problems.

The seemingly-simple ethical accounting turns turns fiendishly complicated once you dive into the details. Every accounting scheme produces clearly wrong results in some cases. Utilitiarians propose ever-more-complex approaches, each of which turns out to have its own pathologies. This obviates utilitarianism’s most attractive feature: its intuitive simplicity, at first glance, compared with the endless rules of deontology and the elaborately literary conceptions of virtue.

When challenged, utilitarians usually argue that, on balance, their theory is less bad than deontology or virtue ethics—which they regard as the only two possible alternatives. (The fact that all three are clearly wrong does not seem to motivate a search for other possibilities.)

Utilitiarians suggest that, even if it is impossible to calculate the overall goodness of actions, doing so even approximately is correct approach to ethics. They feel that there must be a version of their theory that actually works, and that all-purpose methods of approximating must exist—even though they are presently unknown. This is a nice example of eternalistic wistful certainty.

Eternalism is the denial of nebulosity↗︎︎: the fact that meaningness is inherently indefinite, uncertain, and untidy. Utilitarianism proposes a fixed↗︎︎, objective, sharp-edged theory of ethics—which I believe is entirely impossible.

The nebulosity of ethics is uncomfortable. It means we can have no guarantee of acting ethically, no matter how hard we try. It means ethics is really hard.

Utilitarianism promised, at first glance, that ethics is easy, just a matter of adding some numbers. Looked at in detail, it makes ethics impossible, not merely really hard.

Eternalism is always a con; it always makes huge, infinitely desirable promises it can’t fulfill.

Later in the book, we’ll look at the ways ethical eternalism’s failure produces ghastly, unethical outcomes.

Perfection Salad

↗︎︎

This is about the harm done by ideologically-distorted concepts of rationality. I wrote it in 1988. My main example came from nutrition. However, the actual subject, by satirical analogy, was cognitive “science,” which I discussed only briefly at the end. Cognitive science was doubly distorted by rationality: it pretended to be rational itself, and also modeled people as rational in ways they aren’t.

I find little to disagree with now, so I’m republishing the text here unaltered. However, I’m following it up with newly-written pages discussing the subsequent evolution of cognitive “science” into neuro-“science,” which inherited some defects; and the growing public realization that nutrition “science” has failed catastrophically.

Introduction

This is an essay about scientism:1 the special social power given to people and discourses that cast themselves as “scientific.” It examines a particular case, “domestic science,” which is now plainly bogus. Thereby it tries to illuminate, and to cast as bogus, other cases (such as “cognitive science”) currently accepted as legitimate.

My theoretical framework here relies heavily on Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality↗︎︎. This book is better titled in the French edition: The Will to Knowledge. It takes sex as a concrete example, but is actually concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power.

My concrete example is drawn from Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century↗︎︎. Shapiro’s book is a history of the “domestic science” movement. Domestic science was founded in the late nineteenth century as, simultaneously, an intellectual discipline and a reform movement, both directed at the improvement of cooking. In its later manifestation as “home economics,” it had an overwhelming effect on women’s lives that has abated only partly in the last twenty years.2

Domestic science provides a neat illustration for the pathologies of intellectualized rationality, authoritative knowledge, and transcendence. Here at the end of the twentieth century, it seems mostly absurd to think that science has anything much to say about cooking,3 and we thus have a degree of distance on a particular manifestation of a group of connected twistednesses that still dominate the way we think about most things.

Authoritative Recipes

Domestic science, like everything that calls itself a “science”, presented itself as a field of intellectual endeavor. Intellectual fields are supposed ideally to be “detached.” However, the domestic scientists primarily pursued a practical project: reforming the way Americans cooked. To this end, they amassed vast power, as was inevitably necessary to radically change the lives of tens of millions of people. They pursued a particular route to this power, one which has become extremely important in contemporary society: the validation of discourse.

We are accustomed to thinking of power inhering in institutions and political roles. In fact, as Foucault first pointed out, most power in the modern world lies in discourse: in the control of knowledge. However, these sorts of power are synergistic, and the domestic scientists were able to accumulate considerable institutional power:

Then they quickly assembled all the appurtenances necessary to a full-fledged profession: syllabi for course work at every level, degree-granting programs of study, a professional organization, a journal, and annual meetings. … they could now join forces with institutions that might help them solidify their position. Home economics easily won a place in industry, education, and government… and the arrangement satisfied everyone concerned. (pp. 7–8)4

This institutional power, however, was useful not so much because it gave domestic scientists the ability to directly control other people’s actions, but because it validated and gave authority to their discourse.

Knowledge is power only when it is accepted as authoritative. A discourse is validated as authoritative when it is established that any of a class of questions is to be answered in terms of that discourse. In this case, domestic science established itself as the discourse in terms of which any serious question about food would have to be answered. The process of establishing institutional validation for a body of discourse is a crucial part of assembling power-through-control-of-knowledge. We can see it happening all around us now; it is clearly visible, for example, in the extraordinary political success of connectionism↗︎︎, whose modus operandi is neatly described by the paragraph quoted above.

Once a group has established their knowledge as authoritative, anyone who has direct power is forced to consult them, if only as an ass-covering maneuver.

Domestic scientists were being sought not only as teachers but as experts, and in the field of institutional feeding their participation became especially prominent. Many were invited to examine the diets of hospital patients, prisoners, asylum inmates, college students, and other groups subjected to quantity cooking on a small budget, and to make recommendations for improving the nutritional quality of food at the lowest cost. After their disillusioning experience with the mass of poor and working people [who insisted on eating food that tasted good], Mrs. Richards↗︎︎ and her colleagues welcomed the opportunity to work with these more captive populations. (p. 161)

Much of the rest of my essay is concerned with just how the validation of domestic science was achieved. What about a body of discourse makes it easy to render authoritative? In our culture, the best strategy is to cast the discourse as a “Science.” This strategy has been followed, with varying degrees of success, by Domestic Science, Library Science, Astrological Science, Materials Science, Agricultural Science, Political Science, Sanitation Science, Dental Science, Management Science, and Cognitive Science. The strategy involves smearing a particular sort of rhetoric over the subject matter and the performance of a variety of meaningless but culturally valorized rituals involving the invocation of such deities as “precision” and “repeatability,” scientific-looking tools, and the use of numbers whenever possible. The goal is to make the actual practices of the group resemble those of physicists as nearly as possible.

Scientific Food

At the time domestic science was at its height only two things were actually known about food: that different foods had different energy densities (measurable in calories per ounce) and that food was made up of varying proportions of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Nothing more would be learned until the discovery of the vitamins two decades later. This did not stop domestic scientists from proposing that every housewife be taught considerable amounts of any science that seemed potentially relevant, including, for example, psychology, physiology, bacteriology, and chemistry (p. 65).

If the housekeeper could be made to think of herself as a scientist, calmly at work over the beakers and burners in her laboratory, then every meal would emerge as she planned, pristine and invariable. (p. 86)

Science genuinely relevant to food had yet to be invented. So domestic scientists applied irrelevant science, and prescribed scientific-seeming rituals to be adhered to when cooking. For instance, a science is supposed to involve experiments, and demands that these experiments be repeatable. The rhetoric of domestic science equates cooking with laboratory experimentation:

…an enthusiastic social reformer in the domestic-science movement complained … that “even the intelligent housekeeper still talks about ‘luck with her sponge cake.’ Luck! There is no such word in science, and to make sponge cake is a scientific process!” (p. 86)

One of the hallmarks of science is measuring things.

Exact measurement was the foundation for everything else that happened in the scientific kitchen, although there was not always agreement about how to reach exactitude. (p. 115)

Domestic science invented standardized measures for food in the 1880s. The cup was standardized as a half-pint at this point, for instance.

[Fannie] Farmer’s interest in exact measurements went far beyond cups and spoons, however: she liked to specify that strips of pimento used for decoration be cut three-quarters of an inch long and half an inch wide, and she could measure out spices by the grain. (p. 116)

Other things that could be measured were all the basic chemical properties of food. Energy density is still considered relevant, but very few of the others are; except in a few extreme cases, the pH of foods is irrelevant. However,

“Chemical analysis should be the guide for the cookery book,” she urged, and looked forward gladly to the day when a laboratory microscope would be standard equipment in every kitchen. (p. 130)

Some domestic scientists advocated that every kitchen include complete equipment for quantitative chemical analysis.

Science is big on charts and graphs, and domestic scientists rose to the challenge. Shapiro shows, for instance, a “Cupcake chart” with a huge matrix of numerical entries, and describes a “meal chart” in which

…protein, carbohydrate, and fat were distributed with an exactitude that demanded kitchen scales, a ruler, and some arithmetic. Atop two rolls, for example (combined weight, two ounces; cost, two cents; percent protein .170; calories, 163), the man was permitted to spread a one-inch cube of butter (weight, one ounce; cost, two and a quarter cents; percent protein, none; calories, 224)… What eluded her scrutiny, however, was the nature of the food itself. To balance a meal by numbers alone, ignoring taste and texture, meant that creamed potatoes, creamed vegetable soup, macaroni with cream sauce, salad with creamy dressing, and gelatin with cream were all listed on the menu for Day Two, along with stewed prunes, stewed corn, and stewed tomatoes. (p. 209)

Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this was the “Dietary Computer” (no kidding) invented by Ellen Swallow Richards↗︎︎, who was the first woman graduate of and first woman instructor at (of course!) MIT.5

Ellen Swallow Richards
Ellen Swallow Richards

Meal plans were justified in terms of the process of digestion, or rather the process as it was understood.

The meal began with a clear soup, which Mrs. Rorer planned specifically for its lack of nutritive properties. The stomach was supposed to simply rest on the soup, gathering strength, as she explained it, “before the heavy work of digesting a spare rib.” Applesauce accompanied the spare rib, the acid countering the fat, according to rule… (p. 80)

…the chewing required by salted almonds would increase the circulation of blood. In this way a good supply of blood would be furnished to the stomach… (p. 81)

What I find most interesting in all this is that the domestic scientists knew that their understanding of nutrition was very incomplete, but they did not hesitate to make prescriptions for action based on them that determined the way Americans ate for more than half a century. What little genuine understanding they had did not support these prescriptions. For instance, they could measure energy density. By itself, though, energy density tells you nothing about how to cook. So they made the arbitrary assumption that more was better, and used as much sugar and fat as possible (p. 76). To this assumption can probably be credited tens of millions of deaths from heart disease.

Many of the variables on which the domestic scientists’ prescriptions were based, such as pH, seem now to us to be irrelevant, and others that we consider central couldn’t be measured and so did not enter into the prescriptions. Since vitamins had not been discovered, domestic scientists were not big on fruits or vegetables, which didn’t have much protein, carbohydrate, or fat in them, and mostly seemed to be water.

Domestic scientists assumed that the ratios of protein, carbohydrate, and fat were relevant variables, and based diet plans on theories of the “correct” ratios. “Nutrition scientists” are still doing this, and so far as I can tell they still don’t know what the “correct” ratios are, because every five years they confidently declare that they have discovered with complete certainty that we should have twenty-three percent or thirty-seven percent or seventeen percent protein in our diets, and American eating habits obediently shift accordingly. Most likely there are no “correct” ratios, because lots of other variables are involved.

Rational Cookery

The cult of science is part of the cult of rationality. By “rationality” here I mean rationality as an intellectualized prescriptive ideal. Ultimately, it is by presenting a discourse as rational that it is validated. Presenting it as scientific is one means to this end. Rationality requires other rhetoric and ritual practices, not strictly scientific, which we can see in operation in domestic science.

Rationality mandates control.

…color-coordinated meals… represented most of all the achievement of an extraordinary degree of control over the messy, unpredictable business of the kitchen. (p. 84)

Rationality demands that practice accord to formal rules.

Rather than learning to consult their instincts, their sense of taste, or their imaginations, fledgling cooks were taught to depend on rules, which existed on a lofty plane far above the pleasures of appetite. (p. 90)

Rationality prescribes certainty.

The extraordinary degree of predictability that was the triumph of mass-produced food had been sought for years by laboratory-based scientific cooks, and its achievement represented the fulfillment of one of the major goals of domestic science: the attainment of certainty. An ever-sturdier sense of finitude, objectivity, and perfect control could now be discerned in recipes and meal plans… (p. 206)

Rationality requires “objectivity,” or distance from the subject matter. The ideal was a “carefully maintained impersonality between the cook and the food” (p. 211). This is accomplished, in part, by abstract representation.

Sometimes, in fact, it was possible for a cooking teacher to strip away so much of what she considered extraneous to the process of cookery that the remainder could be reduced to a chart, itself a stunning acknowledgement of the now frozen distance that separated the cook from the food. (p. 206)

Rationality promotes generalizations, even when these do great violence to the phenomena.

Studying the diets of black tenant farmers in Alabama, then, the investigators noted that women and children often worked in the fields alongside the men, but since there was no way according to the method to take that work into consideration, or to assign nutritional needs to it, they decided for convenience sake to assume that it didn’t exist. (p. 167)

One participant at the fourth Lake Placid conference had taken an informal poll of twenty-two families to find out what they ate, and the results distressed her. Although there was a great deal of repetition in the daily menus within each household, she told her colleagues, the variety from house to house was dizzying. Evidently “local tastes and family idiosyncrasies” still exerted a powerful influence over the dinner table, preventing the development of “conscious standards” in meal planning. … “It is true that all people do not demand the same kind of food. This is due sometimes to acquired appetites, sometimes due to finicalities of appetite due to bad living and sometimes to the fact that people have not enough other interests besides that in eating and drinking.” When people advance to the stage of what she called “rational living” … they would find that “unreasonable preferences for particular foods” disappeared. (pp. 213–214)

Observing the meticulous rituals of rationality is the high road to status in our culture.

… these [completely bogus] dietary investigations helped boost domestic scientists to a new height of self-respect. The clean and precise task of gathering information for scientific analysis could not possibly be confused with cooking, much less eating, and the institutional backing of the federal government gave the work an orderliness and a magnitude that surpassed their most ambitious reveries. To have acknowledged individual quirks like pregnancy or child labor would only have interrupted the smooth operation of the intellectual machinery, and dragged down the whole process into a slough of those idiosyncratic emotional responses traditionally called female. (p. 167)

Rationality worship is central to many, perhaps most, of the twistednesses of our culture. I should like to say a lot more about this here, but the topic is too large. I think you can imagine that if we analyzed most other parts of contemporary culture we would find them shot through with the same disease we find here in cooking. I would very much like to study the way in which rationality worship, a form of institutionalized insanity, gives rise to both individual and group twistedness.

Transcending Physicality

No matter how modern, civilized, rational, and scientific we are, some activities remind us that we have somehow failed to escape being animals; bodies; physical objects↗︎︎. Eating is one. Thus, we eat in ritualized ways that try to deny, as much as possible, that it is a necessary bodily process. The bestiality of eating is enhanced by the fact that what we eat is other living things. I occasionally suddenly realize that the thing I am putting in my mouth is a part cut out of the sexual organ of a plant which sat around outdoors, rested on earth, got rained on, had bugs wander over it, and pumped sap around inside itself, and am momentarily horrified and disgusted↗︎︎. One of the great goals, and eventually triumphant successes, of domestic science was to disguise the bodily nature of food.

Most authorities recommended one to three hours’ boiling for string beans, forty-five minutes for asparagus, twenty minutes for cucumbers, half an hour for celery, and up to twelve hours for beets. … Salad greens, which did have to be served raw and crisp, demanded more complicated measures. The object of scientific salad making was to subdue the raw greens until they bore as little resemblance as possible to their natural state. … One cook recommended cutting lettuce leaves into “ribbons of uniform width” for a more orderly arrangement, and the most popular version of a spinach salad required the spinach to be boiled, drained, chopped, molded into little cups, unmolded, and decorated with a neat slice of hardboiled egg. (p. 96)

The physicality of food makes it disagreeable not only to eat but also to cook.

Handling food, she emphasized in a letter in a letter to Atkinson, was “distasteful to women” … [meat in particular] cannot be handled without disgust. (p. 151)

Various devices were invented to avoid the necessity of actually touching food while cooking it: the chafing dish, mechanical bread kneaders, and a device known as the Aladdin Oven, for example.

Food, ideally, ought to be stripped of concrete properties; those properties it retains should be as pure and abstract as possible. This ideal was triumphantly realized in the development of products like Cheez-Whiz and Jell-O, which have no texture, pure primary colors, and no identifiable source in the natural world. Kool-Whip additionally has an elemental flavor, being simply sweet. Crisco, then, is the ultimate food product, having no texture, color, or flavor; a food so abstract it is easy to forget that it is coarsely physical, and to imagine that it resides rather in the realm of Platonic forms, side by side with cylindric algebras and cohomology groups.

This attempt to deny physicality is a central theme in our culture, one closely connected with that of rationality.

Domestic Science is to Food as Cognitive Science is to People

It seems now to us ludicrous that science should have much to say about cooking, yet this was accepted without question in our parents’ generation. It is now accepted without question that science has a great deal to say about “cognition.” And our views of what sort of things we are, and a great many institutional policies, are shaped by what “cognitive scientists” say about us. Cognitive science is twisted by rationality worship twice: as with other sciences, it twists its own methods to conform to rationality’s dictates, but it also reads rationality into its own subject matter, casting people as rational.

To make my analogy explicit, cognitive scientists, like domestic ones, are wont to apply irrelevant branches of science, smear empty mathematics over the phenomena, make absurd generalizations from variables they can measure while neglecting anything they can’t, adopt outward trappings of physicists even when they are inappropriate, constantly engage in meaningless “scientific” rituals, and make confident policy recommendations (e.g. concerning education) based on what they know to be extremely incomplete understandings. As rational beings, they both seek for themselves and impute to their subject matter control, practice according to formal rules, certain knowledge, objectivity, abstract representation, and generalization.

Seeing the absurdity of these practices in domestic science should make cognitive science also look absurd. I think it likely that “cognitive science” will seem as much of an anachronistic oxymoron in thirty years time as “domestic science” does now.

Just as cooking is slowly recovering from domestic science, our understanding of ourselves will slowly recover after cognitive science is discredited.

Epilogue, 2014

It has been more than a quarter century since I wrote that. What progress have we made? Has food recovered from domestic science? Has our understanding of ourselves recovered from cognitive science? I’ll address those questions in the following pages.

Oh, and if you were wondering about the title, “Perfection Salad” is a bizarre “scientific” dish that would now be unrecognizable as food, but was popular as late as the 1960s. There’s a picture and recipe here↗︎︎.

  • 1. Nowadays people argue about how “scientism” should be defined, in order to promote their particular ideologies of what counts as rational, and therefore what bodies of knowledge should be granted authoritative social power. That wasn’t true in 1988, or anyway I was unaware of it. In 2014, I'm not interested in arguing about what scientism “really↗︎︎ means” or should mean; the covert power-grab in that kind of argument is partly what this essay is about!
  • 2. I.e. starting around 1968, twenty years before I wrote this.
  • 3. Alas, a quarter-century later, “science” is still claiming authority over food, with results that have probably been catastrophic. I discuss that in the follow-up.
  • 4. All page numbers are from the first (1986) edition. I haven’t read the second (2008) one.
  • 5. Despite my poking fun at her here, she had an impressive career and seems to have been overall a Good Thing.

Nutrition offers its resignation. And the reply

↗︎︎

Dear human species,

Today we, the professionals of nutrition, offer you our resignation. This letter—signed by virtually every nutrition scientist and technician, clinical nutritionist, dietician, and food journalist, worldwide—is our heartfelt apology.

We screwed up. We failed completely.

We may have killed millions of people. We’re really, really sorry about that. However:

Our most important message to you today is: we know absolutely nothing about nutrition. Our field is intellectually bankrupt.

What’s worse, we have no clue how to find out anything about nutrition.

The only conclusion we can draw, from decades of elaborate and extremely expensive research, is that our research methods don’t work.

Admittedly, in retrospect, many of us were incompetent, were biased or outright corrupted by power interests, or pursued personal food ideologies that had no basis in data. However, even our largest, most careful studies, funded by neutral parties and run by our best scientists, gave only equivocal results.

We’d totally understand if you never want to have anything to do with us again. There’s no reason you should listen to anything we have to say. However, we do have two requests.

  1. We’re pretty darn sure no one else knows anything about nutrition, either. Please don’t listen to “alternative” nutrition quacks. We’ve been there, and we know.

  2. Obviously, there’s no point doing any more nutrition research for the foreseeable future. It would just be more of the same. However, we’d like to ask that some of the nutrition research budget be redirected into meta-nutritional research: to try to understand why we failed, and if there are other methods that might work.

  3. Please eat a healthy, balanced diet.1

Signed,

[Every nutritionist in the world]

1. Just kidding!

Separator

Dear nutrition professionals,

Apparently, you are clueless. You have no idea what your jobs are.

As your employers, we thought we were hiring people with more than two neurons, who could figure out the obvious without having it spelled out completely literally. But no.

Your job is to wear white lab coats while saying that food ingredients are healthy and unhealthy, and to wave charts around. That makes the ingredients authoritatively healthy and unhealthy, which covers our asses.

Some of us have to feed something to school children. Parents demand that school lunches be “healthy.” What does that mean? You don’t know, and we don’t care. What matters is that when parents sue the school district, we can point at you waving charts around. “See! Science! Science says it’s healthy! Go away!”

Some of us have to sell breakfast pastries. Consumers demand that their breakfast be “healthy.” We know you have no idea what that means, because for every ingredient on our master list of industrial food components, you have said it was good one year and bad the next. We made up our own chart↗︎︎, you know? Three columns: ingredient, study that proves it causes cancer, study that proves it prevents cancer. Our food engineers make pastries out of whatever optimizes cost and shelf life, and then the marketing department pastes “Coreopsis free! Now with added chelicerates!” on it. That’s what makes a healthy breakfast pastry.

Some of us make most of what everyone eats: high fructose corn syrup, soy oil, and wheat flour. Just one↗︎︎ of our companies sold $81 billion of that stuff last year. It has been authoritatively proven to be healthy. By Science. By you.

Go back to work. Your resignations are hereby rejected. If you refuse to continue waving confusing charts around, we will hire other people who are less fussy. There will be nutritionists; we don’t care whether or not they are you.

Signed,

[The governments of every country in the world, the agriculture industry, the food processing industry, the supermarket industry, and so forth.]

Nutrition: the Emperor has no clothes

Food pyramids

More than a quarter century ago, in “Perfection Salad,” I wrote: “It now seems ludicrous that science should have much to say about cooking… cooking is slowly recovering from ‘domestic science’.” In the 2014 epilogue, I asked: “Has food recovered from domestic science?”

  • “Domestic science” was rebranded as “nutrition science,” with all the same pathologies. That has yielded zero reliable knowledge.
  • Despite complete ignorance, nutrition “science” issued and enforced confident recommendations that may have been responsible for millions of premature deaths, plus great loss of health and quality of life.
  • Meanwhile, industry has developed considerable genuine science of food—oriented to optimizing commercial ends, rather than health and tastiness.
  • Partial public awareness of these problems has produced a proliferation of pseudoscientific, quasi-religious food subcultures.
  • Passionate belief in mythical meanings of food probably have a evolutionary origin.
  • Recently, some pundits have started to suspect that—as I suggested in 1988—no one knows what makes food healthy. Perhaps now the public can begin to resist all claims to authoritative food-knowledge.

Food, eternalism, scientism, and pseudoscience

Nutrition ideologies rest on the eternalist↗︎︎ ploy I call “wistful certainty”:

There must be a correct diet; there must be a rational way to discover it

There’s no reason to believe either of those; indeed, there’s strong evidence against each of them.1 The power of wistful certainty comes from the unspoken alternative: “otherwise, we would have no control over our health, Science would fail, and the world would be hostile and unfair and we might as well just give in to hopeless nihilism↗︎︎.”

This ploy underlies both obviously silly New Age nutrition pseudoscience and authoritative state-endorsed nutrition pseudoscience.

What makes you call nutrition “pseudoscience?” That seems like a wild claim. It’s true that it has failed repeatedly, but isn’t that the way science works? We can’t demand certainty; science can only say what is most likely based on the available evidence. It’s true that a lot of studies have been done badly, but that doesn’t invalidate the best work; it just means we need to insist on better experimental methods.

There is always uncertainty in science, but real science gradually establishes some stable facts; it eventually strongly supports some theories and conclusively dismisses others. It is typical of pseudoscience that it does not progress.

Nutrition has made no progress. It has discovered no stable facts. Everything nutritionists have said, they have said the opposite ten or twenty years later (if not much sooner). They literally know nothing.2 After a century of countless experiments, the most common, most basic problem they’ve addressed—the optimal ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate—is completely unsolved. If they can’t figure that out, anything more sophisticated seems hopeless.

Nutrition is now both scientism and pseudoscience. This is a somewhat rare combination; cognitive science is another example, as I pointed out in “Perfection Salad.” Scientism—the eternalistic distortion of science into an authoritative source of meaning—is most harmful when the science is bogus. Pseudoscience is most harmful when it gets the support of the state and other powerful institutions. Food and theories of the mind probably both strongly affect human well-being, so they are particularly bad subjects to have turned into scientism or pseudoscience.

My point is not that nutrition is bad science. Unquestionably, ↗︎︎; a competent statistician, looking at the design of most experiments, will immediately say “this is meaningless↗︎︎; you can’t learn anything this way.”

It’s worse than just incompetence, in two ways. First, as the “resignation letter” noted, even the best studies have been useless. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, such that doing the same sort of science better wouldn’t help.

The second, still worse implication is that worthless pseudoscience can get treated as authoritative for a century, and even now. This is partly due to rationalist eternalism↗︎︎, and partly due to institutional imperatives produced by malign social dynamics.

In which “Science” kills a few million people

Just when I wrote “Perfection Salad,” in the mid–80s, nutrition had its greatest breakthrough. “Scientists” “discovered” that fat (especially saturated fat, and doubly especially cholesterol) was the cause of the two biggest causes of death in rich countries: cardiovascular disease and cancer.3 Cardiovascular disease is caused by fat (especially cholesterol) accumulating in blood vessels. So, obviously, eating less fat will prevent cardiovascular disease. Cancer is caused by oxygen free radicals chemically modifying fat into a form that attacks DNA, creating mutations, so obviously if you eat less fat, that happens less.4 Besides, fat has twice as many calories as protein or carbohydrate, so obviously if you eat less fat, you won’t get unhealthily overweight.

There was virtually no actual evidence↗︎︎ for any of this, but it made sense. (“It makes sense!” is the rationalist basis for all pseudoscience↗︎︎.) “Obviously, it’s urgent that Americans be protected from cardiovascular disease and cancer, so waiting for conclusive evidence before sounding the alarm would be irresponsible.”

A massive public “education” campaign followed. Perhaps astonishingly, in response, Americans dutifully drastically decreased their fat intake (especially cholesterol). This followed the pattern I described in 1988:

Domestic scientists assumed that the ratios of protein, carbohydrate, and fat were relevant variables, and based diet plans on theories of the “correct” ratios. “Nutrition scientists” are still doing this, and so far as I can tell they still don’t know what the “correct” ratios are, because every five years they confidently declare that they have discovered with complete certainty that we should have twenty-three percent or thirty-seven percent or seventeen percent protein in our diets, and American eating habits obediently shift accordingly. Most likely there are no “correct” ratios, because lots of other variables are involved.

An epidemic of obesity began just around the time this “education” campaign began. Health outcomes have been awful. It seems likely that low-fat diet advice actually caused the diseases it was supposed to prevent.5 In any case, most studies concluded that dietary cholesterol does not increase blood cholesterol and does not cause cardiovascular disease; and the saturated fat evidence varies↗︎︎ between weak, zero, and counter to the low-fat theory.

Some people started pointing this out↗︎︎ more than a decade ago,6 and it’s now nearly the mainstream view↗︎︎. However, nutritional authorities aren’t quite ready to admit to killing a few million people↗︎︎ with their bad advice.

In the aftermath of failure

As of early 2015, the establishment is trying to figure out how to retract their anti-fat advice, while doing as little damage as possible to their reputation. They are sending up various waffly↗︎︎ trial balloons↗︎︎, experimenting with PR strategies.

Saving nutrition’s reputation is a matter of self-interest. Also, many in the field are probably just too stupid to realize the magnitude of their failure, and honestly assume that somehow Science must know something.

However, more sophisticated players seem to be thinking:

Admitting outright that we were wrong could discredit nutrition permanently—or even Science as a whole↗︎︎. Even though we know nothing now, with better Science, we’ll probably discover the truth soon. It’s critical to preserve respect until then, so people will listen when we get it right. Otherwise, they’ll fall prey to New Age woo and commercial quack diet faddery.

You can hear this in the background of the waffling. I think it is too late; the public is already losing trust.

There’s another problem: if the advice is not anti-fat, what can it be? Some in the field seem to be trying to establish a new consensus, organizing to make anti-sugar the new message. This would take us back to the 1960s–70s, when sugar was the Big Bad. Maybe it is. Who knows? I’m reasonably sure nutritionists don’t.

Another PR strategy has been to blame wrong dietary recommendations on corruption, due to industrial influence. Probably corruption has, indeed, been a significant factor. However, this is a typical example of the eternalist strategy of explaining away failure as due to extraneous factors, which preserves the illusion of present and future competence.

Why has nutrition science failed? At this point, we can’t know. I believe that all available nutrition research funding should be redirected to answering that question. In the mean time, I’ll speculate:

  • It may not matter what you eat. For example, Ioannidis has recently argued↗︎︎ that reported nutritional effect sizes must be grossly overstated, and diet may not have a significant effect on health after all. On the other hand, the observation that peoples become much less healthy when they start eating Western food does suggest that diet is significant. However, this might be due to simultaneous adoption of some other, as-yet unidentified harmful aspects of the Western lifestyle.

  • It may be that what makes a healthy diet is so different for different people (due to different genetics and/or lifestyles) that experiments done on mixed populations are meaningless. (I think this is relatively unlikely, for evolutionary reasons, but worth pursuing as a possibility.)

  • An intriguing possibility is that what you eat matters, but not for you. Until recently, all nutritional research assumed that dietary effects worked via human metabolism. Recent studies suggest that gut bacteria play an important role in human health, and that diet affects them much more than it affects human cells. If this is right, biochemical studies of diet have been looking at irrelevant factors for the past century. (I hope this is right, because it might lead to rapid progress, and also because it’s funny.)

Reverse regulatory capture

Honest nutrition scientists would, as in my satirical “resignation letter,” admit that the field has failed, they know nothing, and they cannot now give any meaningful recommendations. I think this would actually be more likely to preserve public trust, in the long run, than the current attempts at waffling and bluffing and muddling. The field is probably too cowardly for honesty, though. The emperor now realizes he has been seen parading naked, but will pretend not to know, to save face.

Anyway, as the “rejection” reply letter explains, institutional imperatives make it impossible to admit ignorance. There will be nutritional recommendations, even if every nutritionist has to be fired in order to create them. Governments, and the food industry, cannot accept that nothing is known, because they would no longer have any basis for their institutional policies. They do not care much what the policies are; but it is critical that they exist.

Initially “domestic science” captured regulators;7 but then state institutions captured nutritional “science.” Once it was established that there were authoritative facts-of-the-matter about what people should eat, state institutions (schools, prisons, the military) needed stable, simple, crisp guidelines about what they were allowed to feed people. For school administrators, it doesn’t matter what the nutritional theory is, but it is critical that there be an authoritative theory they can demonstrate conformity to, in order to remain blameless. So the power here is mainly in the authority-giving power of rationalistic discourse, not in the institutions (much less individuals).

The processed food revolution

In 1988, most American meals were still cooked from scratch. Now that’s rare. Nearly all American food is the product of intensive industrial engineering systems. These rely on new, genuine food science↗︎︎—about how to reliably extrude optimized food-like products, not about what is healthy or (for the most part) tasty. The capture of food by rationality is therefore essentially complete; but it is rationality optimizing for ends we might not choose.

Since we don’t actually know anything about nutrition, it’s impossible to know whether the new engineered food products are unhealthy. From the food industry’s point of view, uncertainty is good, because nowadays any food can be labelled with multiple supposedly-beneficial qualities, according to assorted competing theories (probably none of which have any relationship to reality).8

The obesity epidemic suggests something has gone badly wrong with the Western diet, in which case it must have something to do with processed food, just because nearly all food is now processed.

One of the trial new messages being tested by the nutrition establishment is “avoid processed food,” which has the big advantage (for their future credibility) that no one is likely to adopt it. Cooking has become an unacceptable hassle.9

Public recognition and resistance

Until recently, public opposition to official food recommendations was mainly religious or “ethical.” The monist counterculture (“New Age”), a quasi-religious movement, has produced a series of opposition diets since the 1970s. Although some of these invoked pseudoscience, and made vague health claims, they were all mainly moralistic. They were anti-scientific and anti-capitalist (as monism typically is). The rise of politically-correct food labelling (“fair trade”) may have been partly in response to increasing public realization of the dubiosity of nutritional claims, but it was mainly explicitly ethical.

An uneasy sense that nutrition recommendations had changed too many times, too quickly, seems to have gradually dawned on the public starting about a decade ago. Up until then, almost everyone simply accepted official pronouncements without question. Early 2000s studies supporting the high-fat Atkins diet seem to have shifted the mood. Intelligent people recognized that nutritional advice is uncertain, and liable to change again soon. So then you have to ask: why bother paying attention to the current guidelines?

There’s been another, dramatic change over the past year (starting late in 2014, I think). Science-savvy members of the commentariat—journalists and bloggers—are finally starting to recognize that there is no there, there: nutrition has no cards to play↗︎︎.10

Meaningful food

It’s extraordinary how certain and passionate everyone is about their nutritional beliefs—mainstream or alternative—despite the lack of any basis for them. Religion and politics are the only other domains that commonly inspire such delusional commitment.

Every human culture gives elaborate meanings to food—to hunting, gathering, growing, harvesting, processing, cooking, sharing, and eating it. Every culture has elaborate ideologies of what you should and should not do with food—most of which seem insane to anyone from a different culture. (These constitute the standard example of the eternalist ploy of purity.)

Food is hugely evolutionarily important, so it is not surprising that humans give it such meanings. It’s rather more surprising that something so evolutionarily important should have such divergent meanings attached. Aren’t most of them maladaptive?

A speculation: Perhaps the urge to give foods meanings is a relic of our former hunter-gatherer lifestyle, when keeping track of the edibility, habits, and best use of thousands of species was important. Mythological narratives (“we are forbidden to eat that berry by Flying-Buffalo-Woman, who was tricked with one by Centipede-God”) were valuable as mnemonics encoding cultural knowledge. Often that could be a matter of life and death.

Nowadays, even though the evolutionary purpose is lost, we can’t help making up myths about food, and still feel compelled into believing and enforcing them.

I will discuss the meanings given food again in two later chapters:

  • The ethics chapter considers the moralization of food. There are legitimate ethical questions, but many claims I find highly dubious: not because they are ethically wrong, but because the issues are not ethical ones at all. I use these as examples of a broader phenomenon: the metastasis of morality into domains where it has no business.

  • In the history of meaningness chapter, I will describe how the meaning of food has changed over the past few decades, as we’ve moved through the systematic, counter-cultural, subcultural, atomized, and fluid modes of relating to meaningness.

  • 1. There are healthy non-Western populations with diets very different from each other’s. Some of those may be somewhat better than others, but there’s no strong reason to believe so. A century of scientific research has failed to discover any nutritional facts. More and better research might; but we can’t be certain of that a priori.
  • 2. For “literally know nothing,” see for example the recent Ioannidis editorial↗︎︎ in the BMJ. There are two exceptions. First, they know you should shouldn’t eat poisons. Arsenic and polychlorinated biphenyls are bad for you. Second, there are some chemicals (vitamins, for instance) that you have to get some of, or else you get a deficiency disease. Neither of these facts are relevant to anyone with a vaguely normal diet.
  • 3. The supposed connection with cardiovascular disease goes back to the work of Ancel Keys in the 1950s. However, avoiding saturated fat and cholesterol for cardiovascular reasons only became the mainstream message around 1980. The supposed cancer connection was new in the mid–80s, and gave further credence and urgency to the anti-fat campaign.
  • 4. This led also to the recommendation that you should eat more antioxidants. That message is still common, although most follow-on studies of specific antioxidants found that they are bad for you.
  • 5. Since nothing is actually known about nutrition, we can’t be sure the low-fat diet caused the obesity epidemic. Correlation is not causation; but it’s quite suggestive in this case.
  • 6. The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet↗︎︎ is supposed to be a good history. I haven’t read it.
  • 7. I described this in “Perfection Salad.”
  • 8. Ioannidis notes↗︎︎ that “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome.”
  • 9. Disclosure: I do avoid processed food, and most of what I eat I cook from scratch. This is not advice.
  • 10. The paleo movement has played a major role in this. Paleo is interesting as a subculture that combines romantic rebellion with scientistic rationalism. That potent combination that has made it the most effective anti-authoritarian diet ideology so far. With difficulty, I’ve resisted writing more about that here; this page is already too long.

A malign modern myth of meaningness: cognitive “science”

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The climax of “Perfection Salad” made fun of “cognitive science.” I dismissed it as a pseudo-science that had twisted our understanding of what people are like. That was in 1988, when people still took it seriously. In the 2014 epilogue, I asked: “Has our understanding of ourselves recovered?”

The short answer, unfortunately, is “no.” The reason is that the delusions of cognitive “science” were transferred to neuroscience, which has continued to propagate the same wrong ideas into mass culture.

“Perfection Salad” was written for an audience of cognitive scientists, just at the time it was becoming obvious that the field had failed. My readers understood the issues in detail, and could see, as they were reading about cupcake recipes, how I was satirizing their discipline. Readers of Meaningness won’t have that background, so I will fill in some explanation here.

However, I can sketch only briefly the cognitivist conception of people and why it is wrong. The background concepts needed to explain exactly what’s wrong come only later in this book. So I won’t try persuade you if you accept those ideas currently.

Instead, this page will explain something of why those ideas matter, where they came from, how and why they traveled from philosophy to cognitive science to neuroscience, and the damage they do.

The “damage” section takes as an example Sam Harris’s justification for America’s wars in the Middle East, supposedly based on cognitive neuroscience as applied to Muslims. I take no position here on those wars. However, his ideas about how Muslim “beliefs” causally result in violence are ludicrous and harmful.

Eternalism in politics

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Political eternalism starts with the wistful certainty that:

There must be a correct system of government; so if we adopted it, it would solve most political problems

This attractive idea—held by nearly everyone—has no basis in reality. It’s a hopeful metaphysical belief, not something grounded in evidence or reason.

Eternalism is the stance↗︎︎ that everything has a fixed meaning, given by some sort of Cosmic Plan↗︎︎.

Wistful certainty” is a ploy for maintaining eternalism. The certainty is wistful because, even if there somehow is a correct system of government, we don’t know what it is. That is unacceptable, however; governance is too important for it to be nebulous↗︎︎ (uncertain; indefinite). If it were nebulous, the Cosmic Plan would be defective. This creates a cognitive dissonance that eternalism resolves by creating an artificial certainty that some political system is absolutely justified.

This spurious certainty can lead to hideous tyrannies. However, the root problem is just thinking that there must be some correct form. Once you have that idea, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that whatever form seems best (or is most convenient) is indeed the cosmically right one.

The ploys political eternalism uses to maintain itself in the face of doubt are strikingly similar to religious ones.

Also, for many people, political eternalism functions as an overarching all-purpose foundation for meaning, much as religions can. This has become particularly true in the past hundred years as religions have been widely discredited, but people still feel the need of a foundation for meaning.

This has been discussed widely by social theorists as “political religion↗︎︎”; critics rightly point out that political systems are not actually religions, although they have some of the same functions. The concept “non-theistic eternalism” is helpful here in explaining the similarities.

[This page will provide an overview of political eternalism, introducing a section on the topic. Pages in the section will cover various instances and aspects of the phenomenon.]

[Here’s a nice quote:]

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.
—Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, paragraph VI.II.42.

Nihilism: the denial of meaning

The Pillars of Creation (dust clouds in the Eagle Nebula) seen in infrared

Nihilism holds that there is no meaning or value anywhere. Questions about purpose, ethics, and sacredness are unanswerable because they are meaningless. You might as well ask about the sleep habits of colorless green ideas as about the meaning of life.

Nihilism is a mirror image of eternalism↗︎︎—the stance↗︎︎ that everything is meaningful. (For an introduction, see “Preview: eternalism and nihilism.”) However, the two stances are not simply opposites; they share fundamental metaphysical assumptions.

Eternalism and nihilism both fail to recognize that nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎ are inseparable. Therefore they suppose that “real↗︎︎” meaning would be absolutely patterned: perfectly definite and certain, unchanging and objective. This is their shared metaphysical error.

Eternalism insists that meaning really is like that. That is its second metaphysical error. Nihilism observes, accurately, that no such meaning is possible. This corrects the second error. However, because nihilism shares the first error, it concludes that meaning is impossible, period. This is also wrong; nebulous meanings are “real,”↗︎︎ for any reasonable definition of “real.”

Nihilism is attractive to those who have explicitly recognized, understood, and rejected eternalism’s second error: belief in ultimate meaning↗︎︎. That is not easy. Nihilism is, therefore, the more intelligent stance. Or, at least, it’s a stance that tends to be adopted more often by more intelligent people. (It’s even more dysfunctional than eternalism, so we could also call it less intelligent.)

While most people are committed↗︎︎, however waveringly↗︎︎, to eternalism, only a few commit to nihilism. In denying all meaning, nihilism is wildly implausible. Only a few sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives try to maintain it.

We’ll see, though, that almost everyone adopts↗︎︎ the nihilistic stance at times, without noticing. When the complete stance↗︎︎ is unknown, nihilism seems like the only possible defense against the harmful lies of eternalism. (Just as eternalism seems like the only possible salvation from the harmful lies of nihilism.)

Even if you are relatively immune to nihilism, it’s important to understand as a prototype. Many other confused stances↗︎︎ are modified or limited forms of nihilism. They reject particular types of meanings, rather than rejecting all meaningfulness. That makes their distortions, harms, and emotional dynamics similar to nihilism’s.

Overview

The first page in this section discusses several obstacles you must overcome to even get to nihilism. The main one is the obviousness of meaning. Even before that, you have to let go of the hope that eternalism can somehow be made to work. There are also strong social and cultural taboos against nihilism. Finally, nihilism has nasty psychological side-effects that make you miserable.

The second page↗︎︎ explains briefly what it would mean to accomplish↗︎︎ nihilism: a state of total apathy. This would, theoretically, end suffering (which is one reason nihilism is attractive). It’s probably impossible, although some religious systems seem to advocate it.

Most of my discussion of nihilism concerns its emotional dynamics. I begin with an analogy: eternalism is like one of those email scams that promises you millions of dollars in exchange for help getting money out of Nigeria. If you fall for that, catastrophic financial loss ensues.

Nihilism entails a similar catastrophic loss: the loss of meaning. The next page gives an overview of our psychological reactions to that loss: rage, intellectual argument, depression, and anxiety. Each gets its own, more detailed page.

In addition, I address the content of nihilistic intellectualization. This is a collection of reasons for rejecting obvious meanings as “not really meaningful↗︎︎.” They are supposedly the wrong kind of meaning; not ultimate, not objective, not eternal, not inherent, or not higher. So what? These arguments are bogus and nonsensical. They usually conceal a hidden motivation: the issue is not qualitative (the “wrong kind” of meaning) but quantitative (available meanings seem inadequately compelling). This is a psychological and practical problem, not a philosophical one, so psychological and practical methods may help.

The antidotes to nihilism↗︎︎ are partly intellectual: realizing why it’s incorrect and harmful. Mainly, though, antidotes restore meaningfulness, by making it more powerful, more obvious, more compelling, more enjoyable.

You’ve got nihilism wrong

NASA nebula image

If you think you are not nihilistic—I think you are mistaken.

If you think you are a nihilist—I think you are mistaken.

I hope this chapter on nihilism will be useful both to people who think they aren’t nihilists, and to people who think they are.

Nihilism is a thing you and I, personally, do sometimes. Everyone does, sometimes.

If nihilism were just a conceptual philosophy—something to think and talk about—you could safely ignore it. But doing nihilism is bad for us: bad enough that it’s worth the effort to stop. This chapter explains how.

For non-nihilists: what you can learn from nihilism

I will suggest to non-nihilists that understanding nihilism in detail is important. You are right to reject it: nihilism is harmful and mistaken. However, it is not an abstruse philosophical irrelevance, because everyone falls into nihilism at least occasionally. I’ll suggest that you may be more nihilistic than you realize, and it may be causing you more trouble than you think.

What is at stake here is our understanding and control over our own lives. Nihilism matters because meaning matters, and the best-known alternative ways of relating to meaning are also wrong.

Fear of nihilism is a main reason people commit↗︎︎ to other stances↗︎︎, such as eternalism↗︎︎ and existentialism↗︎︎, that are also harmful and mistaken. A clearer understanding of what’s wrong with nihilism can help you avoid those too.

For nihilists: this is not the usual denunciation

The usual arguments against nihilism are nonsense↗︎︎. I will confirm that you are right to reject them. I will agree with much of what you believe about meaning, and agree that it is important. Meanings are, for example, not cosmic, eternal, or personal, and this matters.

Realizing that eternalism and existentialism are wrong is the main reason people try to be nihilists, which makes it a more intelligent stance.

However, nihilism itself—“nothing is meaningful”—is harmful and mistaken. This chapter explains why, with detailed analyses that are unlike those you have seen before.

I hope to persuade you that you cannot actually be a nihilist, because you are too intelligent to fully convince yourself that nothing is meaningful. However, committing↗︎︎ to nihilism, and attempting to live by it, may be causing you more trouble than you realize.

For both nihilists and non-nihilists: a better alternative

Fortunately, there is another possibility, not well-known, the complete stance↗︎︎. It is not harmful or mistaken.

However, you can only get there once you understand exactly why nihilism and eternalism are both mistakes. That is why you may find it worth your while to read this chapter—whatever you currently think about nihilism.

Rumcake and rainbows

Rainbow
Rainbow image courtesy↗︎︎ Eric Rolph

Obviously meaningfulness is either outside your head (“objective”), or else inside your head (“subjective”).

There are excellent reasons to believe it is not outside your head. There are excellent reasons to believe it is not inside your head.

This is the essential argument for nihilism.

But what if meaningfulness is not either inside or outside, and does exist? How could that be?

Where are meanings? A false choice

Kumquats

Three facts seem true:

  1. Meanings are not objective.
  2. Meanings are not subjective.
  3. Meanings exist.

Almost everything said about nihilism assumes these three together form a contradiction. In that case, one of them must be false:

  1. Denying the first fact is eternalism↗︎︎: the stance↗︎︎ that meanings are objectively fixed↗︎︎.
  2. Denying the second fact is existentialism↗︎︎: the stance that meanings are subjective, and so can be chosen at will.
  3. Denying the third fact is nihilism↗︎︎: the stance that nothing means anything.

Each of these confused stances↗︎︎ is mistaken and harmful. The proper and useful conclusion from the three facts is that meaning is neither objective nor subjective.

Kumquats are neither just nor unjust—and yet, amazingly, they exist! Kumquats are neither triangular nor square—yet, astonishingly, they exist! How on earth can this be!

Kumquats are not a sort of thing that can be just or unjust. Meanings are not a sort of thing that can be objective or subjective.

Triangular and square are not the only shapes. There is also oval. Objective and subjective are not the only ways of being. There is also interactive.

Physical analogies for meaningness

Marbles in and out of a jar

Concepts about meaningness↗︎︎ all rest on physical analogies.1 Physical analogies are the basis both of physical explanations of meaning, and of theories that deny meanings are physical.

Unfortunately, these analogies are misleading. That is not because meaningness is non-physical—the explanations I give later in the book are physical. They are misleading because the wrong sorts of physical phenomena get used as analogs.

Nihilism rests mainly on a bad analogy: that meanings have definite locations, like little physical objects. A marble is either in the jar, or out of the jar. Meanings, most people assume, are either inside your head, or outside your head.

But meanings are not specifically located. Neither are some better-understood physical phenomena: reflections, rainbows, and mirages, for instance. At the end of this page, I’ll suggest these are better (though still imperfect) analogies for meaning.

Putting meanings in things

Rum cake
Soaked in meaning

A natural view is that meanings are objective: inherent in things. Consider purpose, for instance, one of the main dimensions of meaningness. The purpose of a pot is cooking. The purpose of wheat is nutrition. The purpose of your stomach is digestion.

This is the way everyone thinks about purpose most of the time, because it’s simple and mostly works. If we left it at that, it would rarely cause problems (despite being wrong). Unfortunately, there are philosophers, who want to make up stories about how things work. So how do inherent meanings work?

Well, humans make things for purposes. So apparently the maker of a pot gives it its purpose. But what about natural things like wheat? Here, we need God, who created the natural things, and gave them purposes. In the Medieval worldview, all things had fixed, intrinsic purposes, according to their kind. Things not obviously useful were created by God to provide moral lessons. The pelican, for example, stabs its own breast to draw blood to feed its children:2 a paradigm of compassionate self-sacrifice.

Likewise, every kind of object has an intrinsic degree of value, according to the Great Chain of Being↗︎︎ decreed by God.

On this view, God puts meanings in objects, like marbles in a jar. Or, a better analogy would be the jelly in a jelly donut: you can’t see the meaning just by looking.

Actually, if you cut things open, you can’t find the meaning inside. It doesn’t ooze out. So maybe meaningfulness is more like a fluid that suffuses objects. If you soak a sponge cake in rum, that invisible essence pervades the dessert, and you can’t specifically locate it—although you can taste it.

How does this work? God works in mysterious ways, but how exactly does a human potter put the meaning in the pot? What is this meaning made of, and where do you get it from? If a potter puts a pot-meaning into a hammer, what then? If you always use a pot to hold marbles, instead of for cooking, have you changed its inherent purpose?

As the scientific worldview developed, it became clear that physical objects are “just atoms and the void.” There’s no place inside objects for meanings to hide.

Nothing is inherently meaningful. Nihilism is quite right about that.

This does not mean everything is inherently meaningless! Meanings are not a sort of thing that can be inherent, because they have no specific location. As we shall see.

Putting meanings in minds

Fortune cookie: Zhuangzi say, meanings not in your head

A potter cannot put a purpose in a pot; but the potter knows the purpose of the pot. Perhaps the purpose is inside the potter, not the pot. The potter can explain the purpose of pots to their users, and then it lives inside them too.

Probably in their heads. Like marbles. Although, if you cut open people’s heads, you can’t find any.

So, we invented “minds,” which are metaphysical jars for putting meanings in. Despite being immaterial, the mind is also somehow in the head. Maybe it’s one of those subtle fluids, which pervades the brain, like rum.3

The problem with putting meanings in people’s heads is that people disagree. If meanings were in objects, we could resolve conflicts by determining the objective truth. But disagreement is fatal for all subjective accounts of meaning. This is most obvious in ethics. If I consider eating people OK and you consider it morally wrong, and if what it means to be right or wrong is nothing other than our opinions, then we cannot even begin a discussion. We cannot state any reasons, and there is no way to change someone’s mind. (How would this work in educating children? “Stop biting your sister!” “Subjectively, it is right for me to do so.”)

So, we could put the marbles in God’s head. His job was to keep track of all the meanings for us; and it was jolly decent of him to work so hard at it. Sadly, after a protracted illness, he died in the 1880s↗︎︎. A series of attempts to construct other eternal ordering principles↗︎︎, as replacement meaning-keeping golems, all failed.

Since God joined the choir invisible, most people have held individualistic, subjective theories of meaning.4 Two popular ones are existentialism and the representational theory of mind.

Existentialism says you have to craft your own marbles by hand. It’s frightfully important that yours be different from everyone else’s. You must be creative and artistic and intuitive when making your very own meanings. Also, romantically rebellious↗︎︎ and resolute and heroic and stuff. Unfortunately, this project proves impossible: at most, a tiny fraction of personal meanings can be distinctive.

The representational theory of mind says that meanings are like little slips of paper, with the meanings written on them, that live in your head. A cookie fortune is meaningful if you can read it and what it says creates a new relationship between you and the world. Who reads the meanings in your head? How do they create relationships? It takes a billion tiny spooks to do that.

If you are a nihilist, you have understood—correctly—that subjective theories of meaning cannot work. Subjective meaning is none at all.

If you believe in a subjective theory, you may balk at that claim. I’ll give detailed arguments later in the book. Few of those are new or likely to surprise you, though. Subjectivism appears plausible only when it seems the least bad of the three bad alternatives.

So, you may be better persuaded by explanations of how meaning can be neither objective nor subjective, but interactive. Like… a rainbow.

Like a rainbow

Photographer with rainbow

A rainbow is a three-way interaction among the sun, water droplets, and an observer.

A rainbow is a physical phenomenon, but not a physical object. It has no specific location. Two observers standing a hundred feet apart will see “the rainbow” in different places. If you drive toward a rainbow, it appears to recede just as fast, so you can never get to it.

Rainbows are pretty fully understood, and guaranteed 100% metaphysics-free.

Although an observer is necessarily involved, a rainbow is not subjective. It is not “mental,” not an illusion, and does not depend on any magical properties of brains. The observer can just as well be a camera.

The rainbow is not in your head, or in the camera. But it is also not an object-out-there. It is not in the mist, and not in the sun, although both are required for a rainbow to occur.

A rainbow is not “objective” in the sense of “inherent in an object.” It is “objective” in a different sense: the presence of a rainbow is publicly verifiable. Rational, unbiased observers will generally agree about whether or not there is a rainbow.5

To make the analogy explicit, meanings:

  • are interactions among people and circumstances
  • are physical phenomena, but not physical objects
  • have no definite locations (whether inside or outside heads)
  • are observer-relative, to varying extents
  • are usually well-understood, and 100% metaphysics-free
  • are mostly not subjective, mental, illusory, or dependent on magical properties of brains
  • are not inherent in objects
  • mostly are publicly verifiable, so reasonable observers mostly agree about them

This analogy makes plausible the claim that meanings can be non-objective, non-subjective, and existent. That is good enough for this chapter, because nihilism mostly seems plausible only if you accept the forced choice among objectivity, subjectivity, and non-existence.

In nearly every other way, meanings are unlike rainbows, so it’s important not to take the analogy literally. One important difference is that a rainbow’s observer (whether animate or artificial) is mainly passive.6 Observation does not affect the sun or mist. Meanings are activities, in which causality typically runs in all directions.

Rainbows once seemed magical, mysterious, and metaphysical. Now we have a pretty complete understanding of them. Meanings may now seem magical, mysterious, or metaphysical. They’re more complicated than rainbows—but I think we can gain a pretty complete understanding of them too.

I will replace the rainbow analogy with much more detailed and accurate explanations later. These too draw on physical analogs, such as the chaotic pendulum; but mainly on observing meanings directly. As background, the explanations require considerable conceptual machinery that will be unfamiliar to most readers, but fortunately that is not necessary for this chapter.

  • 1. Later in the book↗︎︎, I suggest that metaphysical intuitions about matters other than meaning are also misplaced physical intuitions. This may explain why people defend metaphysical intuitions so strongly, despite their often differing dramatically from person to person, and despite their having no empirical basis.
  • 2. Or so it was believed. Presumably no one has ever observed a pelican doing this, but that doesn’t seem to have been a problem.
  • 3. The mental fluid idea goes back at least as far as Galen↗︎︎, in the second century AD, who called it “psychic pneuma.” Descartes promoted a similar model↗︎︎ of “animal spirits”: “a fine wind, or lively and pure flame.” That was highly influential, although conceptually incoherent and anatomically ignorant even for his day. Maybe no one believes this theory now, but it’s still a common way of thinking. For instance, explanations of the extended mind theory↗︎︎ are commonly misunderstood as promoting some sort of ectoplasm that oozes out of your skull and goes on astral adventures.
  • 4. Many religious people do commit↗︎︎ to the marbles-in-the-mind-of-God theory, of course. I gather that living in a predominantly secular culture makes this difficult to maintain consistently, however. Slipping into a relativist, subjective view is a constant danger.
  • 5. Later, I’ll explain how nihilism and eternalism exploit such ambiguities in “objective” and “subjective” to render plausible reasoning that would otherwise seem plainly false.
  • 6. Although, perception is actually an active process. This turns out to be important in understanding how meaningness does work, and I’ll come back to it in the discussion of objects and boundaries later.

Cold comfort: the false promise of nihilism

Sticker: NIHILIST LIVES DON’T MATTER

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Nihilism’s promise is “you don’t have to care.” Nothing means anything, so why would you.

Nihilism promises evasion of all responsibility. You don’t have to do anything, because nothing matters.

Nihilism promises simplicity, an escape from the wearying complexity of nebulosity↗︎︎.

Nihilism promises certainty: there is definitely no meaning anywhere, so you can give up the fruitless search for its ultimate↗︎︎ source↗︎︎.

Nihilism promises cold comfort: you may be miserable, but nothing better than misery is possible. It takes you back to zero; negative utility is just as impossible as positive utility. You are not missing out on anything.

All these promises are lies.

The nihilist elite

Cover of The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

To commit↗︎︎ to nihilism requires unusual intelligence, courage, and grit. Eternalism↗︎︎ is for the stupid, the weak, and the lazy. Nihilists know this, and so consider themselves an elite class. Membership in that elite is a major attraction for some would-be nihilists.

Unfortunately, nihilism is also stupid, weak, and lazy.

And, the class pretensions of nihilists are ugly, self-deluding, and sometimes dangerous. Nihilism tends toward fascism: “we are the only ones smart enough and tough enough to face the truth, so we should rule.”

Nihilist elitism depends on the implicit belief that recognizing the meaninglessness of everything is meaningful. That’s self-contradictory.

Nihilism is hard

Gas clouds in the Trapezium of Orion

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

It’s a pity that it’s so hard to be a nihilist. Nihilism is mistaken and harmful, but its insights into what’s wrong with eternalism↗︎︎ may make it the easiest route into the complete stance↗︎︎.

The obstacles to nihilism are that eternalism—nihilism’s opposite—is attractive; and that nihilism is obviously wrong and harmful↗︎︎. These might seem fatal, except that eternalism is also obviously wrong and harmful. When you have been beaten up by eternalism often enough, nihilism may seem less bad.

In slightly more detail, the obstacles to nihilism are that:

  1. it’s hard to give up hope that eternalism will someday deliver on its promises
  2. there is a strong social and cultural taboo against adopting↗︎︎ nihilism
  3. meaningfulness is obvious (so nihilism is obviously wrong)
  4. nihilism’s dire psychological side-effects make you miserable

The first two are “bad” obstacles, in the sense that they are obstacles to the complete stance too. The second two are “good” obstacles, in that they can shift you out of nihilism into the complete stance. I’ll explain each of them further below.

In practice, because meaning is obvious, committed↗︎︎ nihilists usually adopt some sort of Nihilism Lite↗︎︎. That is, wavering↗︎︎ nihilism secretly admits certain kinds of meaning, while denying↗︎︎ others. Much of the rest of the book is about applications of Nihilism Lite in particular dimensions of meaning: stances↗︎︎ that reject some meanings and accept others.

Spam from God

Jesus with his favorite sheep in a cute-n-cuddly heaven

Confidence tricks have a common structure. The victim is offered something that is too good to be true: great value in exchange for something much smaller.

Critically, the victim’s side of the deal is to do something that is itself unethical. That explains why the offer is so good: not everyone, reasons the victim, would do this deal, so the guy offering it to me has to make it sweet. Once the victim realizes he has been scammed, the illegality of his own action prevents him from going to the authorities.

The most common current confidence trick is the Nigerian “419” spam scam↗︎︎. You get an email that reads like this:

Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR SIR,

I AM THE SON OF A DEPOSED NIGERIAN DICTATOR. DURING THE COUP, I MANAGED TO SNAG $30 MILLION AND STUCK IT IN A SECRET NIGERIAN ACCOUNT. NOW I WANT TO GET THE MONEY OUT OF THE COUNTRY BEFORE SOMEONE NOTICES. PLEASE, I NEED YOUR HELP. I WILL USE YOUR BANK ACCOUNT TO TRANSFER THE FUNDS. YOUR FEE FOR HELPING WILL BE $10 MILLION.

P.S. THIS MIGHT NOT BE EXACTLY LEGAL, SO PLEASE DON’T TELL THE AUTHORITIES. YOUR DISCRETION IS CRITICAL TO SUCCESS.

Kitschy eternalism metaphorically sends you spam that reads like this:

Subject: REQUEST FOR URGENT SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP

DEAR SIR,

I AM THE SON OF GOD. I LIVE IN A CUTE ’N’ CUDDLY PASTEL HEAVEN WITH MY FAVORITE SHEEP. I WANT TO GET YOU INTO HEAVEN TOO, BUT I NEED YOUR HELP. UNFORTUNATELY THERE’S LEGALISTIC HITCHES ABOUT SIN AND SUBMISSION TO GOD’S LAW AND STUFF. THEY WOULD SEND PRACTICALLY EVERYONE TO HELL, BUT I’VE FOUND A LOOPHOLE THAT CAN GET YOU INTO HEAVEN ANYWAY. I JUST NEED YOU TO TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN AND PRETEND A BIT AND WE CAN WORK IT OUT.

P.S. DON’T TELL DAD, HE MIGHT GET OLD TESTAMENT ABOUT IT.

This scam is too good to be true—but also too good not to go for. We are all sometimes willing to do violence to our own intelligence in hope of salvation.

And so we all get conned, over and over, by eternalism.

The emotional dynamics of nihilism

The Who—Won’t Get Fooled Again

Nihilism begins with the intelligent recognition that you have been conned by eternalism↗︎︎. Nihilism is the defiant determination not to get fooled again. Having been swindled over and over by false promises of meaning, the nihilist stance↗︎︎ refuses to acknowledge even the most obvious manifestations of meaningfulness—lest they, too, turn out to be illusory.

Betrayal and loss

Eternalism makes seductive promises: that you are always loved, that the universe is in good order, that right and wrong can be known for certain, that your suffering has meaning, that you have a special role in creation, that there will be cosmic justice after death.

When you have been disappointed often enough, you start to realize these sweet lies are poison. Such grand promises cannot be kept. Discovering that you have been betrayed by eternalism, and have lost out on the promises it made, is a horrendous emotional blow.

On the last page, I compared eternalism with the Nigerian “419” fraud. Many retired people have lost their entire life savings to this spam-based scam. They face the same set of emotional reactions we have to any other catastrophic loss, such as a divorce following infidelity: denial, anger, arguing, depression, anxiety, and acceptance.1

On this page, I’ll explain briefly the dynamics of these reactions to loss of faith in eternalism. Then I’ll devote a full page to each strategy separately.

Denial: wavering eternalism

One’s first reaction to recognizing the nebulosity↗︎︎ of meaningness↗︎︎ is to deny↗︎︎ it. On some level, you realize that not everything has a definite meaning; that eternalism is false. But since that seems too awful to contemplate, you refuse to admit it. You redouble your insistence that everything is peachy keen—and prepare to do violence to anyone and anything that contradicts you.

This is wavering↗︎︎ eternalism. You try to maintain the eternalist stance using ploys such as kitsch, arming, and mystification. These are not nihilistic strategies; but they can easily flip into nihilism, when nebulosity becomes so obvious that pretending becomes impossible.

Anger

Nihilism is a simple inversion of eternalism. It denies that there anything is meaningful at all. At times when meaning is particularly evanescent, when you are particularly bitterly disappointed in it, you may commit↗︎︎ to nihilism. “I’ll never get fooled again!”

But this commitment is difficult—probably impossible. Meaningfulness is, at other times, obvious. As a result, in practice all nihilism is wavering nihilism.

Whereas wavering eternalism consists of eternalism plus secret doubt, wavering nihilism consists of nihilism plus secret passion. Passion is the recognition of meaningfulness. To maintain wavering nihilism, you must blind yourselves to meaningfulness, which is even more difficult than blinding yourselves to the nebulosity↗︎︎ of meaning.

Rage is one way wavering nihilism reacts to evidence of meaningfulness. This is a defiant negativity: “I don’t care! No matter what you say, I will not admit life is meaningful!” Nihilistic rage wants to destroy whatever has meaning, and whoever points to meaning. (This is the mirror-image strategy to armed eternalism.)

I mentioned that the people most prone to nihilism are sociopaths, intellectuals, and depressives. These are the people best able to deploy the corresponding approaches of rage, argument, and depression. Almost everyone adopts↗︎︎ all these strategies at times, however.

Arguing with reality

Eternalism uses willful stupidity to not-see nebulosity. Realizing that you have been duped, and seeing through eternalism’s lies, is intelligent. Mostly, only unusually smart people explicitly commit to nihilism.2

Smart people are used to using clever arguments to get what they want. So it is natural to apply intellectual brilliance to the difficult task of maintaining wavering nihilism, to fight its greatest obstacle: the obviousness of meaningfulness. Nihilistic intellectualization is the counterpart to eternalist kitsch: calm insistence on plainly false claims.

Somehow meaningfulness must be explained away by conceptual sleight-of-hand. A theory that proves “nothing is really↗︎︎ meaningful”—in which “really” is the gate to a hell writhing with logical demons—can distract you from the obvious.

This theory has to get complicated quickly in order to be sufficiently confusing, or seem so insightful as to dazzle you into submission. Typically, nihilistic intellectualization involves extreme abstraction, voluminous intricacy, sesquipedalian diction, non-standard logic, and often reflexivity (meta-level analysis). These insulate the argument from checking against everyday experience.3

Because nihilistic intellectualization is often colored by its sister-strategies of anger or depression, it is often aggressive, hostile, cynical, or pessimistic; whereas eternalistic justifications are typically cloying, simpering, naïve, and Pollyanna-ish.

Depression

Realizing that eternalism will always fail often results in anguish, pessimism, depression, stoicism, alienation, apathy, exhaustion, and paralysis.

The loss of guaranteed meaningfulness is a real one, and it is natural to feel sad about it. Depression goes beyond spontaneous sadness, however. It is active and deliberate—although it feels passive and externally imposed.

Nihilistic depression suppresses the feelings (positive and negative) that go with recognition of meaning. Depression can be thought of as rage turned inward. It tries to kill your passionate response to reality.

Depression copes with loss by lowering the stakes. It wants to disengage from problems of meaning by refusing to admit that they are important. If nothing is really meaningful, then the loss of meaning does not matter. Of course, you do care about life. But that is unacceptable when you have committed to nihilism. That caring is the main obstacle to accomplishing↗︎︎ nihilism, and depression tries to annihilate it.

Acceptance

Acceptance of both meaninglessness and meaningfulness is the way out of nihilism, and into the complete stance↗︎︎.

One has to fully allow the emotional loss that comes with the collapse of eternalism. The pain of loss is real and cannot be destroyed, talked away, or minimized (as the nihilistic coping strategies attempt to do). You have to admit that you do care, that the world is meaningful, so the stakes are high. But you also have to learn to turn away from eternalism’s alluring promise to remove the pain by restoring fixed meanings.

Conceptual understanding of nebulosity is probably required. Until you understand how meaningfulness and meaninglessness coexist, confused stances↗︎︎ alternate, jostling for position as meaning and lack of meaning become more and less obvious. The complete stance remains invisible until you learn the sideways move to nebulosity. Nebulosity allows the coexistence of pain and joy, and reveals the benefits of meaninglessness.

Appropriation

Nihilism’s analysis of the defects of eternalism is largely right. That analysis can be appropriated↗︎︎ in the complete stance.

Nihilistic rage can be transformed into clear-minded rejection of fixation↗︎︎; nihilistic intellectualization into non-conceptual appreciation of nebulosity; nihilistic depression into enjoyment of meaninglessness with equanimity.

  • 1. This list is close to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying↗︎︎) observation of the stages of emotional reactions to one’s own impending death. Not everyone necessarily has all the same reactions; but it’s a useful framework for the discussion here. She did not consider anxiety a stage, but it is a pervasive feature of grieving, and other experts have suggested that it should be included in the list.
  • 2. This is a generalization, of course. It is possible to make brilliant conceptual arguments in favor of eternalism (usually in defense of a system↗︎︎, such as an eternalist religion or political ideology). There are probably also stupid people who commit to nihilism (although I have not come across one).
  • 3. Nihilistic intellectualization is characteristic of postmodernist↗︎︎ thought. I will have much more to say about postmodernism later in the book.

Nihilistic depression

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This will expand on a section in “Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics.”

Nihilistic intellectualization

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will explain ways we use spurious pseudo-rational arguments to justify nihilism↗︎︎ by explaining away meaningfulness. It will expand on a section in “Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics”; you can read the summary there.

The following quote from a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article is a somewhat extreme case. It illustrates the general theme nicely, although I am sure you would never think anything so silly!

In the past 10 years, some interesting new defences of nihilism have arisen that merit careful consideration. According to one rationale, for our lives to matter, we must in a position to add value to the world, which we are not since the value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value must be infinity.

Nihilistic rage

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This will expand on a section in “Wavering nihilism: emotional dynamics.”

Nihilistic anxiety

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Nihilistic anxiety is also called existential angst.

Nihilistic anxiety is pervasive; it is not about anything in particular.

Not being able to make sense of specific things naturally causes anxiety about them, because of uncertainty. Not being able to make sense of anything—a consequence of nihilism—causes non-specific, pervasive anxiety.

The underlying worry is that our perception of meaningness↗︎︎ is unreliable. Therefore, there is no sensible way to choose activities. Paralysis results. Anxiety alienates one from all projects, and from social involvement. This is depressing.

Whereas nihilistic rage, intellectualization, and depression include active strategies for stabilizing↗︎︎ nihilism against the threat of meaningfulness, anxiety is purely a consequence.

“Cosmic horror” fiction—such as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories—express nihilistic anxiety. They convey the feeling that everything is horrible and doomed, without making any actual sense. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is silly↗︎︎ (although fun if you don’t take them seriously).

Actually, in nihilistic anxiety and depression, everything shows up as existent but meaningless, and therefore silly. This includes oneself. In existentialism, this is called “The Absurd.”

Perceiving this absurdity is valuable, because it’s funny—or can be. Laughter is enjoyable, which points to a route out of nihilism.

Finding meaninglessness enjoyable is necessary to stabilize↗︎︎ the complete stance↗︎︎, so this is a particularly good way out.

190-proof vs. lite nihilism

Yes yes yes how deliciously meaningless
Yes yes yes how effervescently meaningless
Yes yes yes how beautifully meaningless
Yes yes yes how profoundly meaningless
Yes yes yes how definitively meaningless
Yes yes yes how comprehensively meaningless
Yes yes yes how magnificently meaningless
Yes yes yes how incredibly meaningless
Yes yes yes how unprecedentedly meaningless
Yes yes yes how mind-blowingly meaningless
Yes yes yes how unbelievably meaningless
Yes yes yes how infinitely meaningless

Let’s distinguish six attitudes to “nothing means anything”:

  1. Full-strength nihilism: Nothing is meaningful at all. Period.
  2. Nihilism Lite™: OK, maybe some things are “meaningful” in some trivial sense, but not really meaningful. Those meanings don’t count! Therefore, everything is awful.
  3. Miserabilism: Everything is awful, so nothing means anything.
  4. Existentialism: Nothing is objectively meaningful, but subjective meanings are real.
  5. Materialism: There are no higher meanings, but mundane goals like food, safety, sex, power, money, and fame seem meaningful to us, due to evolution.
  6. The complete stance: Meaning is neither subjective nor objective; meanings are real but nebulous↗︎︎; this is fine!

All these might be called “nihilism,” but they are entirely different in their implications, and in their rational and emotional workings. I will devote a page, or several, to discussing each, separately. Here, I’ll summarize my treatment of each, with an eye particularly to seeing the distinctions between them.

Hardcore, full strength, 190-proof nihilism

Let’s say you stopped by the store on the way home from work to get cat food, because your spouse texted you to say that you’d run out. Getting cat food was your purpose for going to the supermarket. Purpose is one of the main dimensions of meaningness↗︎︎. Going to the supermarket was meaningful: if you forgot, your cat would go hungry and would suffer and complain. This meaning is not merely subjective, at least not in the sense that it’s just in your head. Your cat finds food meaningful, too. If you failed to feed your cat for long enough, it might seriously reevaluate your relationship, and there would be consequences. Your spouse might have something to say, too.

Hardcore nihilism insists that, no, actually, you had no purpose in going to the store. The supposed purpose was an illusion. There are no purposes at all.

This is basically just silly, and motivated only by stubbornness. I don’t believe anyone actually holds hardcore nihilism, although some people do try to argue for it publicly. It is a fallback position when you get backed into a corner by someone pointing out that, obviously, many things are meaningful; yet you want to continue to claim to be a nihilist. It’s logically consistent in a way that (as we’ll see) lite nihilism is not; but it requires defiance of all sense and evidence.

Attempts to justify it involve elaborate intellectual obfuscation: sophistical, scientistical, pseudo-rational fallacies. I’ll cover these in later, in “190-proof nihilism: intoxicating intellectual idiocy.”

Nihilism Lite™

Lite nihilism grants the obvious, that some things are meaningful “in some trivial sense,” but insists that they are not “really↗︎︎” meaningful. The kinds of meaning that would actually matter don’t exist, so you might as well just kill yourself.

So you may agree that going to the supermarket was slightly meaningful, in some uninteresting sense; but you hasten to add that this does not imply that Life has an Ultimate Cosmic Meaning, or anything like that! Which is entirely correct. However, it is a different claim from “nothing means anything.”

Lite nihilism starts from the intelligent recognition that the kinds of meaning claimed by eternalism↗︎︎ indeed do not exist. For example, meanings are not inherent, or eternal, or perfectly definite or certain. That means that the seductive promises of eternalism are harmful lies. It cannot deliver the benefits of total understanding and control that it advertises.

Lite nihilism’s error is the implication that the kinds of meaning that do exist are all trivial and inadequate. This conclusion is rarely (if ever) spelled out in detail. The typical pattern is to jump from “meanings don’t last forever” to “so everything is worthless,” without explanation. There is a powerful emotional logic to this, but is it correct? What exactly is wrong with non-eternal meanings?

What kinds of meaning do exist, once eternalistic delusions are stripped away? For what purposes, and in what ways, are they inadequate—if they are? These questions deserve careful investigation.

The distinction between 190-proof nihilism and the lite version is rarely made explicit, so we tend to switch between them as needed to make nihilism seem plausible. We can slide from “nothing is inherently meaningful” to “nothing is meaningful” without noticing we’re doing that. In fact, we do that deliberately, to pull the wool over our own eyes.

The promise of nihilism is “you don’t have to care.” This works only if there is no meaning at all. You obviously do care about feeding the cat, so only if that is negated could nihilism deliver any benefit. If you admitted mundane matters like cat food are meaningful, you’d effectively transition from nihilism to materialism↗︎︎. Materialism’s promises and emotional dynamics are quite different. The circumstances in which materialism seems attractive are not the ones in which nihilism is attractive, so you may want to avoid the switch.

So the idea here is to trick yourself into thinking that arguments for lite nihilism (or even materialism) are really arguments for full-strength nihilism.1

In “Why is Lite Nihilism mistaken↗︎︎,” I go through various properties that eternalism claims meaning has, and which lite nihilism rejects. (For example, meanings are not eternal, ultimate, or God-given.) For each, I explain why we should not be upset about meaning not working that way.

Miserabilism

By “miserabilism” I mean the view that everything is awful.2 Thinking that everything is awful is depressing, and depression frequently leads to nihilism. Nihilism also leads to depression, and depression leads to thinking that everything is awful, so all three of these support each other. In experience, “everything is awful” and “everything is meaningless” feel similar, and they usually come at the same time.

However, “everything is awful” is actually an entirely different statement from “everything is meaningless.” In fact they are incompatible, because “awful” is a value judgment—a meaning—and nihilism denies↗︎︎ all values. “Everything is awful” can inspire us to work to make things better; it is a potentially powerful source of purpose. By declaring that everything is awful, which is a fixed↗︎︎ meaning, miserabilism is technically a species of eternalism! Nevertheless, I’ll discuss miserabilism further in the section on nihilistic depression.

Materialism

The materialistic↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎, which rejects “higher” meanings but affirms mundane purposes, is often described as “nihilistic.” Materialism does not meet the book’s definition of “nihilism”—denial of all meanings—but it does have some of the same emotional dynamics. Seeing through eternalist claims about higher meanings hits you with the same feelings of loss as nihilism’s denial↗︎︎ of all meanings.

Still, materialism is different enough from nihilism that I devote a separate chapter to it.

Existentialism

I use “existentialism” to mean the idea that meanings must be subjective because they are not objective.3 Then you could either say that subjective meanings are just fine, so there’s no problem; or you could say that subjective meanings are no damn good, so everything is awful.

The “no damn good” conclusion makes existentialism into a branch of Nihilism Lite™. This is what historically happened to existentialism as a cultural movement in the mid-20th century. As existentialists worked out the implications of a subjective theory of meaning, it looked increasingly inadequate and unworkable and led to individual and group rage, intellectual pretentiousness, depression, and angst—the four emotional characteristics of nihilism. As a movement, existentialism collapsed half a century ago.

Many intelligent non-philosophers accept the premise that meaning must be subjective, but don’t see why this should be a problem, and advocate an optimistic existentialism. This stance is rare among academic philosophers.

I think a subjective theory of meaning cannot, in fact, be made to work. Existentialism collapsed for good reasons. The subjective theory of meaning is factually wrong, and trying seriously to make it work leads to nihilism inevitably.

Meaningness develops an understanding of meaning as neither objective nor subjective. Detailed explanation has to be postponed to much later in the book, but there’s a preliminary analysis of existentialism right after I finish with nihilism.

The complete stance (“Joyful nihilism”)

Above, I asked:

What kinds of meaning do exist, once eternalistic delusions are stripped away? For what purposes, and in what ways, are they inadequate—if they are?

This book, Meaningness, could be summarized as an investigation into these questions. It suggests that meaningness is nebulous↗︎︎, which accounts for what’s right in nihilism’s rejection of eternalist meaning. It suggests also that meaningness is patterned↗︎︎: real, concrete, and functional. These patterns are adequate; the nebulosity of meaningness does not imply there is anything wrong with the universe. We can’t get the kinds of meaning some may want, but we can get the kinds we need. Certainty is not possible, but knowledge is; total control is not possible, but strong influence is; complete understanding is not possible, but incrementally better ones are.

Since the complete stance agrees with lite nihilism’s analysis and rejection of eternalism, it might be considered a species of nihilism by some. In fact, I sometimes think of it as “joyful nihilism”—although it strongly disagrees with nihilism’s central claim that “nothing means anything.”

Going through that analysis in detail takes one a fair way toward explaining the complete stance. Upcoming pages will explain why lite nihilism is right to reject eternalism’s characterization of meanings as objective, eternal, inherent, ultimate, and so forth; but wrong to insist that meanings that lack these properties are no good. Accepting both parts of that is tantamount to adopting↗︎︎ the complete stance.

  • 1. This is an instance of the “motte and bailey↗︎︎” pattern of fallacious rhetoric. Usually rhetoric is designed to convince other people, but nihilism is mostly something you try to convince yourself of.
  • 2. I have given “miserabilism” this meaning by fiat for the purpose of this book. The word is not widely used and doesn’t seem to have a clear definition. “Pessimism” is often used for everything-is-awful-ism in philosophy, but the everyday meaning of “pessimism” is restricted to the future. Miserabilism is about the present (or near future, as opposed to the long term).
  • 3. “Existentialism” is not a precisely-defined term. The way I’m using it here may not be “standard,” but it’s roughly in-line with some traditional uses.

190-proof nihilism: intoxicating intellectual idiocy

Everclear 190-proof bottle

190-proof Everclear image courtesy↗︎︎ Bighead

190-proof alcohol is the strongest you can get↗︎︎ by conventional distillation↗︎︎. 190-proof nihilism is the strongest you can get by conceptual disputation.

190-proof nihilism↗︎︎ is the stance↗︎︎ that nothing means anything at all, period.

Nihilism is inherently unstable because it is obviously wrong; meanings are everywhere. However, it is emotionally attractive when it seems the only alternative to eternalism↗︎︎. Then you may commit↗︎︎ to nihilism and attempt to stabilize↗︎︎ it, typically with intellectual argumentation.

These arguments claim to prove that meaning cannot exist. They are abstract, reasoning from first principles.1 Most commit fallacies that render them silly as logic—never mind that they contradict obvious concrete examples. Many of them, for example, “prove too much↗︎︎”: if right, they would equally prove lots of other things can’t exist, like hammers or wings for example.

190-proof nihilism is so obviously wrong that it’s difficult to maintain↗︎︎ for long. Instead, one slides into Lite Nihilism↗︎︎, a weaker stance: that some things have some sort of trivial meaning which doesn’t count.

Usually, one defends the 190-proof version only when backed into a corner by someone who is trying to rescue you from your commitment to nihilism. When they point out that some things are indeed meaningful, holding the line of absolute denial↗︎︎ seems necessary to avoid stepping onto what seems like a slippery slope toward everything being meaningful—the eternalism you’ve rightly rejected.

Uncommonly, 190-proof nihilism can seem plausible and attractive when in extreme nihilistic depression. Then the emotional drive is toward oblivion. The hope is that intellectually convincing yourself that awfulness is meaningless will cut you off from your feelings of anguish and despair. This can work to a limited extent, for a limited period, but usually there are better options.

How to use this section

The web pages in this section go through many arguments for 190-proof nihilism. They point out why each is mistaken. This can function as an antidote↗︎︎, in two ways. However, there is a warning label on the medicine bottle. Taken the wrong way, it could reinforce your stuckness in nihilism instead.

  1. If you have reasoned yourself into nihilism, you can reason your way out. Recognizing that your thinking was logically faulty is a step forward. It’s usually not sufficient, though…
  2. You had powerful emotional motivations for the fallacious reasoning. Uncovering them enables you to work toward a better way of feeling about meaning, which includes the realistic aspects of nihilism without its harms. That is: the complete stance↗︎︎.
  3. You may experience powerful emotional resistance to accepting the counter-arguments in this section. You may feel driven to construct counter-counter-arguments to salvage your commitment↗︎︎. Then you will dig yourself in deeper, adding further intellectualization to the maze of twisty little arguments you are lost in. This is nearly guaranteed if you read the section as if it were abstract theorizing: philosophy. It is not philosophy. It’s an intervention in a dysfunctional way of being.

For the antidote to take effect, you have to want to exit nihilism, and entertain the possibility that you can. If you are committed↗︎︎ to nihilism, and intend to pick holes in philosophical arguments, I suggest you stop now; reading on will be harmful for you.

I recommend paying attention to your emotional experience as you read this. Whenever you find yourself wanting to argue, ask yourself:

  • Why am I trying to prove that nothing is meaningful?
  • What am I hoping to accomplish by refuting this argument against nihilism?
  • Can I locate the emotional payoff of nihilism for me, in this very moment as I read this?
  • If meaning were real, then… what?
  • Am I afraid of the possibility that some things are even slightly meaningful?
  • What else might I have to accept if I admitted that meaning is sometimes real?
  • How might I feel differently, if I admitted that? (Probably bad!)
  • Specifically what would be awful in my life if I took meaning as real?
  • Would I have to change what I do? How would my life, my activities, be different?
  • (Try to imagine how that other life would feel.) What’s awful about it?
  • What would I have to do that I can avoid now?
  • What can I do now that I would have to drop if I accepted meaningfulness?

To help you avoid misunderstanding the section as philosophical analysis, I’ve made the counter-arguments humorous, playful, and brief. (Such humor is characteristic of the complete stance.) They simply point out that each argument for nihilism is silly. They deliberately refuse to take potential counter-counter-arguments seriously. No doubt there are counter-counter-arguments in each case—but those would also be silly. Creating an endless hall of mirrors of fallacious arguments in every direction is what nihilistic intellectualization does.

“Well, what about…?” If you want to exit nihilism, you need to drop that, not indulge it—and figure out why you want to go on arguing that way.

  • 1. First-principles reasoning almost never works in the real world. Each step of deduction must be reality-tested. In the Cells of the Eggplant discusses the reasons for this in detail.

Sartre’s ghost and the corpse of God

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

In this book, existentialism means the stance↗︎︎ that meaningness↗︎︎ is subjective. In contrast, eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎ both assume that meaningness must be objective.

Existentialists also say that for meaning to be “authentic,” it must be a purely individual creation. Meaning should be a perfectly free choice, made after you have thrown off all cultural assumptions and social pressures. That is not actually possible, and existentialism collapses into nihilism if you seriously attempt it.

The complete stance↗︎︎ is that eternalism, nihilism, and existentialism are all equally wrong. Existentialism is a mere muddled middle↗︎︎: an attempt at compromise between eternalism and nihilism that fails because it shares with them an underlying metaphysical assumption. The assumption is that meanings can be localized inside things. Eternalism supposes the meaning of an object is inherent in it (and external to us), so it is objective. Nihilism (correctly) points out that meanings cannot be inherent, and (wrongly) concludes that they cannot exist.

Existentialism supposes the meaning lives inside your head (so it is subjective, internal, and individual). This is also wrong. I will explain later why meanings logically can’t be subjective. They also can’t be individual: they are inherently social. Also, we don’t have perfectly free will to choose meanings. We are constrained by, and unavoidably depend upon, biology and society and culture.

If you try to maintain the illusion that existentialism is possible, you will probably end up adopting the stance of True Self↗︎︎—an idealized ego that would have the capacity to make an individual judgement. You are also likely to make the quest to find your personal meanings into a mission↗︎︎. These hopeful fantasies tend toward eternalism—which can make existentialism attractive. However, both these confused stances↗︎︎ are harmful and mistaken.

Many intelligent people nowadays recognize that meanings cannot be objective, and commit↗︎︎ to the existentialist stance. Some know the history, and call themselves existentialists. But existentialism conclusively failed half a century ago, so the word sounds quaint and dated, and most people who adopt it now don’t realize that’s what they are doing. Many think they’ve invented a clever personal philosophy—with no clue why it won’t work.

If you seriously attempt existentialism, you will fail. You cannot create your own meanings. If you take that failure seriously, and analyze what went wrong, you may recognize that subjective meanings are impossible. Then—since objective meanings are also clearly impossible—you will end up in nihilism.

The way out is to recognize that meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction. One might say that it lives in the space-between subject and object; or that it pervades the situation in which it manifests, including both subject and object. But these metaphors are misleading; meanings simply don’t have locations.

Meaningness: the complete stance

Dramatic cloudscape over Sydney opera house

Image courtesy Trey Ratcliff↗︎︎

This page introduces the central chapter of Meaningness, explaining the complete stance. The complete stance recognizes that meaningness↗︎︎ is both nebulous↗︎︎ and patterned↗︎︎. Put another way, it neither fixates↗︎︎ nor denies↗︎︎ meanings. Or, equivalently: it enables the realistic and creative possibilities that emerge when you let go of eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎ simultaneously.

If you arrived here unfamiliar with the term “complete stance”: postpone this page! It will seem boring and technical. Instead, read “Preview: eternalism and nihilism” for an introduction to the topic.

You are already in the complete stance

The complete stance looks unattractive from a distance because—unlike eternalism and nihilism—it does not claim to be The Ultimate↗︎︎ Answer. Unlike eternalism and nihilism, it makes no comforting promises of certainty, understanding, control, or non-responsibility.

From a distance, it also looks dauntingly complicated, because it works with both pattern and nebulosity, plus their intricate interrelationships.

From its own point of view, the complete stance is simpler than either eternalism or nihilism. It sees only one thing (meaningness) not two (meaning and meaninglessness). It does not attempt to divide pattern from nebulosity—an artificial and impossible separation that causes endless complications.

It’s always obvious that meaningness is both nebulous and patterned. This means that the complete stance is also obviously right.

Because it is obviously right, we are all always already in the complete stance.

Maintaining↗︎︎ confused stances↗︎︎—such as eternalism and nihilism—is actually impossible, because they are obviously wrong. At some level, we are always aware that they require extensive make-believe.

Nevertheless, we are usually somewhat effective at pulling the wool over our own eyes, using the eternalist ploys and nihilist evasions↗︎︎. So we often act as if we were genuinely eternalists or nihilists, and this has awful consequences↗︎︎.

The complete stance looks boring from a distance

The road to the complete stance appears dull, at first, because it is obvious. The way is deflationary: it strips away the enticing dramas of confused stances:

Eternalism
“You are on a Mission from God to fulfill the Ultimate Meaning of the Universe↗︎︎!”
Nihilism
“You have seen through the illusion of meaning and joined the intellectual elite who recognize the hard and cold reality of Ultimate Meaninglessness!”
Existentialism↗︎︎
“You have thrown off the fetters of mindless social conformity, and have the courage to create your own meanings out of raw nothingness↗︎︎!”

We manufacture these dramas because we fear that actually-existing meanings are inadequate↗︎︎. But—exciting, colorful, and appealing as fantasy-meanings may be—they are imposed, delusional, and noxious. We are better off without them.

Freedom from metaphysical delusions

The negative definition of the complete stance, as not fixating or denying meaning, is unappealing. However, it points to the main promise: freedom. Freedom from metaphysical delusions, and their propensity to limit action.

The shared metaphysical mistake underlying eternalism and nihilism is that the only meaningful kind of meaning would be non-nebulous: objective, eternal, distinct, changeless, and unambiguous. Recognizing that meanings are never that way, yet real all the same, is a more positive definition of the complete stance.

We might begin by asking:

What is creative, but not eternalistic?
What is realistic, but not nihilistic?

Dropping attractive delusions is the antidote to eternalism. Allowing meanings to be as they are is the antidote to nihilism. Then you discover that meaningness is adequate after all—more than adequate—wondrous, delicious, and vivid!

If we are always already in the complete stance, are we already done? No. The aim is to stabilize↗︎︎ the complete stance, so we fall back into confused stances less often; and to gain skill in working with fluid meaningness.

Curiosity, playfulness↗︎︎, and creativity↗︎︎ are three aspects of that skill.1 These are not separate; just three different ways of talking about the same art. I will say something about each in this chapter; and more throughout Meaningness.

Because this whole book is about finding, stabilizing, and accomplishing the complete stance; and because the stance is—from its own point of view—so simple and obvious, the chapter is relatively short.

  • 1. Vajrayanists will recognize these—along with “wondrous, delicious, and vivid”—as structural equivalents of “coemergent emptiness, bliss, and clarity,” respectively. Equivalently, these are parallel to the trikaya.

The appeal of complete stances

Child sitting on the trig point on the Schiehallion peak

Sitting on top of the world. Specifically, the surveyors’ marker at the peak of Schiehallion.
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Russel Wills

Complete stances resolve problems of meaningness↗︎︎: nihilistic depression, harms of blind faith, the anguish of ethical dilemmas, bafflement about what you should do with your life…

Misunderstanding meaningness makes many miserable. Overall, the book Meaningness aims to give you tools to shift from confused stances↗︎︎ that cause unnecessary suffering into complete stances↗︎︎. Those are accurate understandings that engender enjoyment of the ways meaningness works in everyday life.

This chapter is the heart of the book: it explains how to find your way to complete stances, what you may find there, and why they might be attractive enough to commit↗︎︎ to them. The chapter is somewhat abstract, so the following ones explain how to apply this understanding in specific sorts of situations.

The appeal of complete stances is dual:

  • They eliminate the particular patterns of dysfunctional thinking, feeling, and acting caused by confused stances, and the suffering that results. Below I’ll say a little about how complete stances resolve problems of meaningness in general. We’ve mostly already covered that for eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎, though; the chapters on those stances explain the antidotes↗︎︎.
  • Complete stances promote ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are not just accurate, but enjoyable and effective. The rest of this chapter is about this intrinsic appeal. Explaining that is a bit awkward, though…

Complete stances

Confused stances↗︎︎ result from rejecting the nebulosity↗︎︎ of meaningness. Either they try to force meaningness into fixed↗︎︎ patterns↗︎︎ (like eternalism), or they deny↗︎︎ its existence or significance (like nihilism). That sets up a confused metaphysical binary, and we mistakenly assume we must choose one side of or the other.

This chapter is about “the” complete stance, which simply consists of allowing nebulosity together with pattern↗︎︎. Then you have no need for fixation or denial. It is the most general and abstract of all stances↗︎︎. It is complete just by declining to use any general rule for discarding possibilities of meaning or meaninglessness. Accordingly, it’s a bit difficult to say much about it—although the chapter does its best.

The rest of the book is about “complete stances” plural. Those consist of accepting the nebulosity of particular dimensions of meaningness, such as ethics, purpose, sacredness, and so on. They resolve confused stances that fixate or deny these dimensions, or issues within them. These complete stances are more specific, so I can describe them in greater detail.

Resolution

If we were imaginary ideal philosophers, our confusions about meaningness would have begun by considering the possibility that all meanings must either be eternally unchanging and perfectly definite, or else non-existent. And then we would have decided that yes, this is correct. In an academic, abstract sense, that conclusion is the root of eternalism and nihilism. But no one actually begins that way, and hardly anyone has such a thought. Instead, we absorb confused stances from our culture as myriad patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. Starting in childhood, we imitate other people who have adopted↗︎︎ them, and they become habitual. The metaphysical errors are implicit. No philosophical reflection is required, and usually little is involved.

Coming to a correct conceptual understanding of meaningness is helpful for dissolving fixations, and for accepting what confused stances deny. Unfortunately, that is not sufficient, or even most of the work. The confusions are deeply ingrained in our cultures and societies, and in each of our own ways of being. Agreeing that a metaphysical error is mistaken doesn’t (by itself) eliminate its harms. There is some intellectual satisfaction in understanding the complete stance, but that is minor compared to its benefits for your life. (Which is why this book is not philosophy.)

Escaping confusion into a complete stance consists mainly of un-doing specific, habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, and replacing them with better ones. You resolve confusions by noticing, over and over, different ways you pretend not to see icky nebulosity; act as if it weren’t there; and are shocked when it screws up your plans. Having noticed, you find ways to allow yourself to see and accept it, and to think, feel, and act accordingly. This takes years.

Gradually you get more comfortable in the complete stance, and less willing to suffer in confused ones. You develop skill in applying the antidotes↗︎︎, and skill in feeling out how pattern and nebulosity intertwine in specific situations. On that basis, you understand better, experience positive emotions more often, and act increasingly effectively. Most of this chapter is methods for that.

Practical problems

Most confusions, and most problems, do not result from rejecting nebulosity. The methods of Meaningness apply only to ones that do. It is “not a general dialectic,” nor an all-purpose fix for everything wrong with your life.

However, wrong ideas about meaningness often cause unrealistic, failing attempts to solve even purely practical problems. We’ll see many specific examples later in the book. A brief, funny but sad one is the story of Fifi’s business plan, which seemed to make sense only because she was in the grip of the confused stance of mission↗︎︎.

With confused stances resolved, you are more likely to take accurate, effective, realistic action in situations where considerations of meaning play some role in the difficulties. This leads to level-headedness, confidence, spontaneity, and good humor—all characteristics of the complete stance.

Talking about completeness

I said that explaining the intrinsic appeal of the complete stance is “a bit awkward.” In this chapter, I cannot avoid words like wonder, awe, play, elation, and joy. You may have conflicted feelings about such terms. (I do!)

However, strong reactions, positive or negative, could obscure the message:

  • These words may be inspiring—in an unhelpful way. They may make the complete stance sound like “Enlightenment,” something very fancy. Then it will remain remote, abstract, theoretical, rather than useful in everyday kitchen-sink life.
  • They may sound kitschy and fake. They remind me of sentimental idealizations of childhood; dumbed-down New Age and Christian evangelizing; and “nice” versions of psychotherapy-ism. Yuck.
  • The words may seem to invoke something special you lost, or never had. That could trigger a sense of hopeless longing.
  • Or they may induce unrealistic urges to recover the specialness through extreme effort or esoteric endeavors.
  • When the unrealism is obvious, the words may provoke cynicism: these are mere fantasies, probably employed to part fools from cash.
  • Or derision: anyone who believes in “wonder” must be pretending to have some sort of superior “humanistic values,” but is actually a naive fool.
  • Or dismissal: “wonder” is a thing, but it’s trivial kid stuff; responsible adults don’t have time to waste on it.1
  • Or anger: it’s important, but unavailable because our society and culture are oppressive and dysfunctional.
  • Or resentment, if you hear this as “you should feel wonder, instead of watching TV.” Who are you to tell me what I ought to feel?
  • Or ridicule: attempts to inspire can easily veer into cringeyness.

All these emotional responses are natural and justified, I think. However, they obstruct my using the words in ways I hope you will come to find reasonable.

The reactions are manifestations of eternalism↗︎︎ (the positive ones) or nihilism↗︎︎ (the negative ones). For that very reason we can appropriate↗︎︎ them to gain a clear understanding! That is: each of these is a correct reaction to some unhelpful way of interpreting the terms. Coming to understandings of “wonder” and the rest which do not provoke any of these responses—because they are neither eternalistic nor nihilistic—is an aim of this chapter.

Appeal

The main part of this chapter describes textures of the complete stance. These are “what it is like”s; ways it can show up in different circumstances. They are intrinsically appealing, and this is where I have to use awkward words. All the ones above, plus for example:

  • freshness
  • intimacy
  • freedom
  • passionate involvement
  • playfulness without trivialization
  • an absurdist sense of humor; laughing in the face of adversity
  • enjoyment of ambiguous circumstances that might otherwise cause anxiety
  • confidence
  • creativity
  • wizardry

Looking ahead to more specific complete stances, they offer, for example:

  • meaningful purpose without compulsion
  • ethical ease
  • humorous affection for one’s foibles
  • light-hearted, effortless accomplishment
  • benefits of religion without dysfunctional dogma
  • heroism and nobility
  • experience of flow, dancing with reality

I suggest open-minded skepticism toward such promises. Cynically dismissing them as advertising hype risks missing out on good things. Accepting them uncritically risks committing to yet another superficially attractive ideological system that can’t deliver. If they seem somewhat too good to be true, but not obviously nonsense, you can investigate by trying out the methods of this chapter. Curiosity implies suspending both faith and cynicism.

  • 1. Wonder, play, joy, and the rest are typically more accessible for children than adults. Why, and what to do about it, are fascinating and important topics, but out of scope for this book.

Peak experiences

Hillwalkers at the peak of Schiehallion

Schiehallion peak image courtesy↗︎︎ William Starkey

One way to understand the complete stance↗︎︎ is through similarities and differences from peak experiences↗︎︎. Religious experiences↗︎︎ such as “enlightenment↗︎︎” or being “born again” are the prototypes. Secular peak experiences may also be induced by mountains or oceans, music or art, sex or drugs.

Words used to describe peak experiences overlap with ones I use to describe textures of the complete stance. Some are wonder, richness, reverence, wholeness, aliveness, simplicity, playfulness, effortlessness, spontaneity, ecstasy, creativity—and completion itself!1 The feelings of peak experiences overlap extensively with the complete stance—but the two are not at all the same.

Peak experiences are rare, extremely intense, and non-conceptual (“ineffable”). Typically they occur spontaneously, with no clear cause. Some circumstances are conducive: mountains, rituals↗︎︎, and concerts, for instance. None of these reliably produce peak experiences, though.

Peak experiences can be transformational, radically reworking one’s routine relationship with meaningness↗︎︎. They can trigger rapid personal development. However, most fade to vague treasured memories instead. That may motivate unsuccessful, increasingly desperate or even destructive attempts to recapture the effects of the experience by repeating what you mistake for the original cause.

The complete stance shares much of the texture of peak experiences, but is quite different too:

  • It is a stance↗︎︎, not an experience: a way of being in the world, not mainly a subjective feeling
  • As a way of thinking and acting, it has extensive conceptual content
  • When stabilized↗︎︎ at least somewhat, it is an everyday occurrence, not rare
  • It is not typically intense—although it does not exclude intensity, and may involve strong feelings, especially at first
  • It can be entered into deliberately, through rational, explainable methods, not dependent on lightning strikes or divine grace
  • It must be cultivated through reflection over many years, and typically doesn’t manifest until you are at least twenty-eight,2 whereas peak experiences often occur in one’s teens or childhood, without specific preparation.

The complete stance can have transformational benefits similar to peak experiences, though it is more gradual. The two also seem to be mutually enabling and mutually illuminating. Peak experiences give brief but memorable exposure to the feelings of the complete stance, which makes it easier to identify in everyday life. The complete stance makes textures familiar and easily accessible, so when intensity occurs, it is more likely to produce a peak experience instead of turbulent emotional confusion.

Abraham Maslow introduced the term “peak experience” in his 1964 Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences↗︎︎; it remains the indispensable work on the topic. He drew heavily on William James’ 1917 Varieties of Religious Experience↗︎︎, also still a must-read. Both books are dated in language and ideology, but packed with insights we might do well to recover.

In the last year of his life, knowing he was near death, Maslow began developing a new concept of “plateau experience.”3 The way he explained the contrast between plateau and peak experiences is quite similar to the comparison I made here between the complete stance and peak experiences. Relative to peak experiences, the plateau is more cognitive; calmer, less intense and emotional; everyday, not rare; and achieved by years of deliberate work rather than unexpected grace.

The previous page described unhelpful emotional reactions to words I use in describing the complete stance: wonder, richness, playfulness, effortlessness, and elation, for example. These may evoke wistful memories of peak experiences, or dubious stories you’ve heard about them. They might give the misimpression that the complete stance, if it existed, would have to be very special, extraordinary, nothing like real life. Negative emotional reactions to that might be justified. This comparison with peak experiences may help dispel the misunderstanding that leads to those.

The complete stance is usually no big deal. It’s not an overwhelming emotional orgasm with choirs of angels and blinding white light.4 It’s quite natural, straightforward, and sensible.

  • 1. All these descriptive terms are from Abraham Maslow’s Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences↗︎︎, the classic text on the topic.
  • 2. Just anecdotally, 28 is the magic number; many people have told me that’s when it started to make sense for them. I’ve no idea why, or whether this would hold up in a more rigorous empirical investigation.
  • 3. There’s a summary in the Preface he added to Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences in 1970. His other statement is in “The plateau experience: A. H. Maslow and others,” Stanley Krippner, editor, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 4, pp. 107–120. A useful review of subsequent work is Nicole Gruel’s “The Plateau Experience: An exploration of its origins, characteristics, and potential,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2015, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 44–63.
  • 4. Not that there’s anything wrong with overwhelming emotional orgasms, choirs of angels, or blinding white light. Nice place to visit, although I wouldn’t want to live there↗︎︎.

Obstacles to the complete stance

Invisible man

Confused stances↗︎︎, such as eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎, are obviously wrong—and yet we frequently adopt↗︎︎ them. The complete stance↗︎︎ is obviously right—and yet difficult even to notice. It seems invisible when needed.

How come? This page covers several common obstacles↗︎︎ to recognizing and adopting the complete stance.

Confusion seems simpler than completion

From a distance, the complete stance appears complex, muddled, and uncertain.

Eternalism and nihilism have a spurious simplicity, clarity, and stability about them.

  • Eternalism: each thing has a meaning; here it is.
  • Nihilism: nothing has a meaning; done.
  • Completion: well, you see, there’s this thing you haven’t heard of called nebulosity↗︎︎, which takes a whole book to explain, and it means that meanings don’t work like everyone thinks: they are not clearly identifiable so you never know quite what they are; but actually nebulosity is the same thing as pattern↗︎︎, which is its opposite, so—

The confused stances are simple opposites; mirror-images of each other. When it becomes obvious that one of them is wrong, the easiest thing is just to invert it, which takes you to the other.

Eternalism and nihilism both take for granted the split between pattern and nebulosity. From both standpoints, fixed↗︎︎ meaning seems the only possible meaning. Once that split is made, the complete stance seems paradoxical. It appears to attempt to combine contradictory claims. Whereas eternalism looks wrong from the standpoint of nihilism—and vice versa—the complete stance looks nonsensical when viewed from any confused stance. Not false: just gibberish.

Completion is invisible—inconceivable—until it is apprehended on its own terms.

Mistaking the complete stance for a confused one

In our attempts to stabilize eternalism, we learned to violently reject evidence that meanings are nebulous—because that seems the slippery slope down to nihilism. In our attempts to stabilize nihilism, we learned to violently reject evidence that meanings are real and important↗︎︎—because that seems the slippery slope down to eternalism.

The complete stance accepts both sorts of evidence. So it incorporates the valid parts of eternalism’s critique of nihilism, and of nihilism’s critique of eternalism.

From point of view of eternalism, anything that contradicts eternalism looks like nihilism: the rejection of meaning. From point of view of nihilism, anything that contradicts nihilism looks like eternalism: an insistence on universal meaningfulness. Thus, from eternalism, the complete stance is indistinguishable from nihilism; and from nihilism, the complete stance is indistinguishable from eternalism. Either way, it becomes effectively invisible.

Too close to see

Whatever you do, however boringly mundane, takes into account the meanings active in your situation. That includes concrete, immediate aspects, such as the usefulness of a potato-masher for mashing potatoes; and also longer-term, more abstract ones, such as the symbolism of vegetables versus meat in your culture. Usually you are not particularly aware of such meanings, you just mash potatoes; but your activity makes sense, and it makes sense only because of them.1

Whatever you do, however exalted your mission↗︎︎, you ignore innumerable meaningless details; irrelevant events that occur for no particular reason and don’t affect your project. You cannot avoid momentarily noticing such features, but you usually dismiss and forget them as quickly as possible.

You are, therefore, always already implicitly in the complete stance. You recognize, at some level, that both meaningfulness and meaninglessness are pervasive.

This is inescapably obvious. It is like the blurred image of your nose, always present in your visual field but almost never noticed. It is so obvious, so much a taken-for-granted aspect of everything you do, that you constantly pass over it without reflective consideration; without thinking through what its implications might be.2

Too simple

The complete stance can be defined in several ways, all ridiculously simple:

  • Recognizing that meaning and meaninglessness both exist
  • Recognizing that meanings are both real and indefinite
  • Abstaining from both eternalism and nihilism

That’s all? That’s it?? That’s your Answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything?!

Well, yes.

I’m sorry you were hoping for something complicated and difficult. That might make you feel like you’d got something when you finally understood it, so you’d have made progress and could feel better about yourself.

There are implications… and applications… and practices… and… enormous conceptual complexities? You are now only a small way through the book Meaningness. Maybe the rest will be more satisfying?

It’s just looking at particular patterns of meaning to see how they are nebulous and what that means, though.

Lack of understandable explanation

Because the complete stance is too simple to accept, it needs a complicated explanation. The Fundamental Texts section of the Meaningness Further Reading Appendix describes several. Unfortunately, each of these is in some way inaccessible for most readers.

The complete stance is invisible simply because no one has explained it in a way many people could follow. What’s missing, and needed, is a complicated conceptual explanation that is nonetheless as plain-spoken and straightforward as possible.

Meaningness aims to be that.

Lack of cultural and social support

Popular culture is all about the confused stances. TV sitcom plots and dialog perform confused stances. Song lyrics express confused stances. “Politics” is the collision of confused stances.

Songs expressing the complete stance are… uncommon.

Many social institutions support confused stances. Most religions enforce eternalism. Most NGOs are infested with mission↗︎︎. The consumer economy promotes materialism↗︎︎.

Institutions promoting the complete stance are… uncommon.

The complete stance is not part of our current everyday world. It is invisible simply because it is unknown.

Sailing the Seas of Meaningness, a much later part of Meaningness, suggests ways the complete stance might become a taken-for-granted aspect of our culture, society, and psychology, in the way the confused stances are now.

Missing emotional pay-offs

Eternalism offers the comfort of certainty of meanings, of a benevolent Cosmic Plan↗︎︎; nihilism offers the comfort that suffering is meaningless and you don’t have to care. The complete stance makes no such comforting promises.

The resolution offered by the complete stance does not take the form of answers. We want answers, because they seem solid, although resolution is what we need. The primordial separation of pattern and nebulosity itself arises from the urge to categorize; to find definite answers. In terms of problems of meaning, we want concrete answers to “should I have sex with my wife’s sister” and “which political cause should I devote my life to.” We do not want an abstract explanation of the ultimate unanswerability of questions of ethics and purpose. That does not seem useful.

The complete stance does offer emotional goods, but they are less obviously appealing. More like healthy vegetables than eternalist candy or nihilist Everclear.

Overwhelmingness

Eternalism and nihilism both produce constricted views on the world. To maintain↗︎︎ either, you must blind yourself to much of what would otherwise be visible. You must un-see the constantly evolving rearrangements of meaning and meaninglessness, of pattern and nebulosity, of understanding and baffled wonderment.

Beginning to see interweaving pattern and nebulosity opens a bigger, richer, stranger world. This can induce agoraphobia—a sense of lost bearings, of exposure in untracked vastness.

The complete stance, when first encountered, can seem emotionally overwhelming. The dynamic tension between meaning and meaninglessness manifests as boiling energy which may be simultaneously frightening and attractive. One’s familiar ways of understanding, of thinking and feeling about meanings—the confused stances—no longer work. Lacking a map of the new world, one may naturally recoil in shock. Retreating to the seeming safety of a renewed commitment↗︎︎ to a confused stance is a common first reaction to a glimpse of the complete stance.

It is best then to proceed gently. Rushing development into the complete stance can backfire. Apply the antidotes to the confused stances, and the practices for stabilizing the complete stance, only when you feel relatively emotionally secure.

  • 1. This alludes to an atypically humorous passage in Thomas Ligotti’s miserabilist↗︎︎ manifesto The Conspiracy against the Human Race↗︎︎. In contrast with 190-proof nihilism, miserabilism admits that some things are marginally meaningful. “A potato masher is not useless if you want to mash potatoes… Buddhists have no problem with a potato-masher system of being because for them there are no absolutes. What they need to realize is that everything is related to everything else in a great network of potato mashers that are always interacting with each other.” Ligotti rightly points out that this does not, as claimed, solve the problem of suffering. (pp. 76-78 in the 2010 edition.)
  • 2. Buddhists may find it interesting to compare some of the obstacles I describe here with the doctrine of “The Four (Seeming) Faults of Natural Awareness.” In this context, “natural awareness” means the non-dual view that perceives form and emptiness simultaneously. It is “natural” not in being common, but in being the default state if you are not actively avoiding seeing emptiness or seeing form—because otherwise both are obvious. In An Arrow to the Heart↗︎︎, Ken McLeod translates the Faults as: “So close you can’t see it; So deep you can’t fathom it; So simple you can’t believe it; So good you can’t accept it.” They are discussed in Ngakpa Chögyam’s Wearing the Body of Visions↗︎︎, pp. 64-65.

Observing meaningness

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Meaningness↗︎︎ is inherent in interaction, so you can observe it, especially while participating in it.

(This is particularly helpful as a corrective to the mistaken Romantic idea of Looking Deeply Within to find True Meaning.)

Maintaining dual attention on your participation for its own sake and as revealing something about the nature of meaningness.

Bearing in mind the texture of open-ended curiosity, i.e. being open to pattern but not forcing it.

Keeping an eye out for:

  • Nebulosity
  • Pattern and nebulosity intertwining
  • Strategies of the confused stances (ploys and evasions)
  • Stance transitions

Insights from ethnomethodology.

Finding the complete stance

Treasure Map

A preliminary move toward adopting↗︎︎ the complete stance↗︎︎, which resolves confusions↗︎︎ about meaningness↗︎︎, is identifying or locating it. What even is it? How do I access it?

As the “Obstacles” page observed, the method is too simple: just stop trying to separate pattern↗︎︎ and nebulosity↗︎︎. If you complain “but how am I supposed to do that,” most explanations are too complicated: obscure, difficult, and over-long.

The complete stance can be approached both experientially and conceptually. You may find one approach easier, or the other. For some, increasing comfort and familiarity with nebulosity in experience, and then finding patterns within nebulosity, gradually leads to conceptual understanding. Meaningness mainly aims for conceptual understanding first. The two approaches are synergistic, and it’s most effective to combine them. Stabilizing↗︎︎ the complete stance eventually requires both: it is “a way of thinking, feeling, and acting.”

This page provides a medium-length explanation of a four-step method for finding the complete stance. It’s ambiguously both conceptual and experiential. I hope it is neither too simple nor too complicated. A more detailed version↗︎︎ appears later in the book.

The fundamental method of meaningness

Specifically in this instance, through open receptivity and passionate involvement: first finding nebulosity; then finding patterning within nebulosity; finding how they relate; and participating from engaged apprehension.

This should sound fairly familiar. It is the method used throughout Meaningness.1 We’ve seen many implicit applications already.

I sketched an informal version in the introduction to the book: “Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning.” Now we can be somewhat more precise and detailed. Let’s take it a few words at a time…

Specifically in this instance

This is a practical method for resolving problems of meaningness↗︎︎ as they arise. It is not about theoretical or philosophical analysis. Applying it to abstractions tends to veer into vapid metaphysical speculation.

Use it concretely, at least at first. Ground the practice in specifics.

When you’ve succeeded with sufficiently many everyday-life cases, you will start to see more general patterns. Then drawing more abstract conclusions may be justified.

Finding, through receptivity and involvement

“Finding” is an imperfect term, in suggesting a finality: you’ve found nebulosity, so you can put it in a box and take it home with you. That is an unworkable fantasy of fixation↗︎︎.

“Finding,” here, implies instead an ongoing interaction.

An alternate phrasing, “looking for” nebulosity, could put too much emphasis on your part in the interaction. It is a little too prescriptive, active, and subjective. Making a project of it—applying a technique, or searching along a mapped path—does not allow for nebulosity’s own active role of manifesting itself in the situation. Nebulosity often shows up unexpectedly, perhaps as breakdown or as serendipity.

“Observing” or “experiencing” nebulosity risks the opposite misunderstanding. These terms are too passive; they put too much of the burden on nebulosity to show itself. They wrongly suggest nebulosity is an objective feature of the situation that can be dispassionately recorded.

“Open receptivity” is the nebulous aspect of your own role in finding nebulosity. “Passionate involvement” is the patterning aspect of your role.

Step 1: Nebulosity first

Viewed from the complete stance, nebulosity and pattern are inseparable, and both are always completely and equally present. However, our usual way of being overlooks or denies↗︎︎ nebulosity, which often seems unwelcome. When approaching completion from confusion, one must overcome the ingrained habit of prioritizing patterns, by attending to nebulosity instead. That’s easier to the extent that you can experience nebulosity positively, and come to actively enjoy it.

The introduction to this book included a preliminary, vague explanation of nebulosity. It said that meaningness is insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, and ambiguous.2

Recoiling from nebulosity stops you from noticing its qualities. It’s just “Ugh! Look away, run away, nuke it from orbit!” Taken as an absolute—as total absence of pattern and of meaning—nebulosity is devoid of characteristics. The five terms “insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous” could be taken just as stating lacks: of solidity, shape, discreteness, continuity, and definiteness. However, since nebulosity is inseparable from pattern, it never occurs absolutely, or in the absence of pattern. When found, it does have these qualities—negative and nebulous as they sound.

We can re-express the five qualities in positive terms. “Positive,” both as characteristics nebulosity does suggest; and as ways nebulosity may be welcome, rather than uniformly noxious. We could say these positive characterizations point toward pattern from nebulosity. That implies also pointing toward their inseparability, as it dances in the middle, between these poles at the extremes. Recognizing and working with this inseparability is the complete stance.

Overall, we could summarize the positive aspects of nebulosity as freedom from fixation↗︎︎. Absolute patterns, lacking nebulosity, would be perfectly rigid. They would create a totalitarianism of existence, in which everything not demanded by the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ was impossible.

Insubstantiality permits movement without restriction. It points toward the fluidity and flexibility of pattern and nebulosity when taken together.

Amorphousness allows for creativity, improvisation, and change, like a sculptor’s modeling clay, when fixed forms might not.

Non-separability can be understood as intimacy, connection, and as the pervasiveness of meaning.

Transience, the fact that meanings and circumstances are not eternal, engenders freshness, opportunity, serendipity, and spontaneity.

Ambiguity provides freedom from fixed meanings. It gives birth to humorousness, openness, and wonder.

These are qualities of the texture of interaction: of perception, action, and awareness. To find nebulosity, lightly bear in mind the possibility of noticing these qualities as they arise in everyday life. When you do, gently investigate further, feeling for their occurrence in specific situations.

Step 2: Finding patterning within nebulosity

The specific words matter here again. One aims at finding patterning, rather than specific patterns. That is, for this method, one avoids solidifying patterning into discrete forms. (Making patterns as discrete and rigid as possible can sometimes be extremely valuable, in engineering, for example. It’s counterproductive for this practice, though.)

“Within” expresses the method of approaching the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern starting from the side of nebulosity. After finding nebulosity, one finds patterning as an emerging aspect of that nebulosity.

The opposite practice is also feasible: finding nebulosity as an aspect of patterns.3 However, the more radical motion from nebulosity toward pattern may make it easier to find the complete stance, by restraining the natural tendency to overemphasize pattern.

So one finds patterning within a particular context that one has already found to be nebulous. That makes it harder to absolutize than a pattern-in-the-abstract. One finds patterning as softened by the nebulosity that surrounds it. Then it points toward their inseparability. (This again is just a method of approach, not the complete understanding. The complete stance takes nebulosity and pattern as mutually pervasive, and recognizes both equally, not favoring either.)

The book introduction described five qualities of pattern: reliability, clarity, distinctness, endurance, and definiteness. Having found nebulosity in a situation, one may attend to the possibility of locating these qualities as well.

The habitual impulse then will be to grasp at them, and to try to separate them from the corresponding qualities of nebulosity: insubstantiality, amorphousness, non-separability, transience, and ambiguity. Restrain this impulse. That is the second step in the method.

Step 3: Finding how nebulosity and pattern relate

“Finding” is a careful word choice here again. It could contrast with “analyzing,” for example. Analysis is sometimes extremely useful, but in this method it would tend to harden patterns prematurely.

Finding requires both gentleness and precision. Gentleness includes intuitive awareness, non-conceptual sensitivity, and receptive exploration. Precision includes clear thinking, close attention, and deliberate investigation. Combining them is restraint from fixation↗︎︎ and denial↗︎︎ of both pattern and nebulosity. That avoids jumping to conclusions before developing accurate understanding.

The relationship between nebulosity and pattern is simple in the abstract: they are inseparable aspects of each other. Nebulosity is always patterned; patterning is always nebulous. But we aren’t doing philosophy here. We want practical resolutions to particular problems of meaningness. How best to sort out a work or family conflict, for example? Specific details matter, so “nebulosity and pattern are inseparable!” is not obviously helpful.

Ways nebulosity and pattern intertwine in a particular situation or domain can be unique, surprising, or unboundedly complex, so ultimately no fixed method for this third step is possible.

However, it often helps to find the simultaneous presence of both of a seemingly-opposed quality pair from among the five. Feel for their mutual pervasion: how is this both insubstantial yet reliable? Amorphous yet clear? Non-separable yet distinct? Transient yet enduring? Ambiguous yet definite? Can these coexist? Can all be true at once? Partially or relatively, at least? This sounds quite abstract, but it may reveal specifics in specific situations.

The rest of “Doing meaning better”—the main division of Meaningness, of which this page is a part—applies the fundamental method to many dimensions of meaningness. How do nebulosity and pattern relate in problems of ethics, purpose, identity, and so on?

In a sense, having read this far, you know everything in the rest of the book. But working through particulars in these different dimensions should make it much easier to apply the fundamental method in your life.

Step 4: Participating from engaged apprehension

This fourth step is the activity of the complete stance itself.

“Engaged apprehension” expresses the pattern and nebulosity of one’s self in interaction.4 It echoes “open receptivity and passionate involvement,” but in the opposite order, because now we are emphasizing active participation. Also, whereas “open receptivity and passionate involvement” are about you, “engaged apprehension” is about interaction, in which you are inseparable from “the situation.” (This inseparability of self and situation is the topic of the upcoming chapter on selfness.)

The complete stance is a better way of thinking, feeling, and acting. These are also inseparable.5 Nebulosity and pattern are sensed as aspects of participatory activity, and participation flows from their inseparability.

The rest of this chapter on the complete stance is mostly about that!

Later, Meaningness and Time applies the method to society, culture, and psychology, across time: past, present, and especially the future. Can a shift to the complete stance resolve our urgent, global crisis of meaning? I believe this is possible.

  • 1. This method is structurally parallel to the Four Naljors of Dzogchen Sem-dé. (The Four Naljors, rather than the Four Ting-nge-dzin, because this page corresponds to the path level in the threefold logic of base, path, and result.) I believe the Four Naljors, and other Buddhist non-conceptual meditation systems that work directly with form and emptiness, are powerfully synergistic with the more conceptual approach I sketch here. For an introduction, see Ngakpa Chögyam’s Roaring Silence↗︎︎, which covers only the first two naljors. shock amazement↗︎︎ is a difficult, advanced text that includes all four naljors and the four resulting ting-nge-dzin. The explanation of the complete stance in Meaningness is not meant as a presentation of Dzogchen. They are structurally parallel, but the subject matter is not the same.
  • 2. This fivefold characterization comes from Vajrayana Buddhism, which takes it as foundational ontology↗︎︎. I don’t think it has any special ontological status, but I do find it useful as a reminder of some ways you may find nebulosity. I’ve modified it somewhat for use in this different context. I recommend Ngakpa Chögyam’s Spectrum of Ecstasy: Embracing the Five Wisdom Emotions of Vajrayana Buddhism↗︎︎ for an extensive explanation of five ways emptiness and form (analogous to nebulosity and pattern) manifest and interrelate.
  • 3. The Eggplant explores this alternative approach. In the domain of technical rationality, which absolutizes patterns, finding nebulosity within them opens out one’s understanding into meta-rationality↗︎︎.
  • 4. “Apprehension” means direct, immediate comprehension of a situation, not necessarily on the basis of full conceptual understanding. The word also can imply worried anticipation, but that’s not the sense here.
  • 5. Buddhists may notice that the phrase “thinking, feeling, and acting” is an expression of the trikaya; their inseparability is the svabhavikakaya.

Textures of completion

The complete stance↗︎︎, the way of being that recognizes the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern, shows up in characteristic textures. For example: wonder, play, and creation.

These textures may appear spontaneously as qualities of thought, feeling, and interaction, at times you adopt↗︎︎ the complete stance. They spring naturally from the dynamic interweaving of nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎.

The previous book page, “Finding the complete stance,” may have seemed unhelpfully abstract. This section on the textures describes what the stance is like, so you can recognize it as it arises.

You can also deliberately enter into the textures, as methods. You can nudge yourself into a texture, as a way of adopting the complete stance in the moment. And you can practice the textures as methods for stabilizing↗︎︎ it longer-term. As such, they are parallel to the eternalist ploys and the nihilist evasions↗︎︎. These are all tricks for stabilizing the corresponding stances.

This is the introduction to a series of six pages, each describing one texture. The six-way taxonomy is somewhat arbitrary. You’ll find that the textures blur into each other; and more could be added to the list. Each is simply “how things go when nebulosity and pattern are not divided,” so they are not distinct.

A spectrum of textures

The six textures can be thought of as each leading to the next: wonder → curiosity → humor → play → enjoyment → creation. It is useful to understand this as a causal sequence. It is also useful to understand that it is not actually one.

As a sequence, the textures are ordered from more nebulosity to more pattern. The order is also from least active to most. Denying↗︎︎ nebulosity is habitual, so you enter the complete stance initially by recognizing it. At first that is simply wonderment: here’s this amazing feature of reality that somehow you’d been overlooking! Wonder is willingness to allow that perception to persist. Then you notice that pattern appears along with nebulosity; and that provokes curiosity. What’s going on with that? As you start to understand how that works, it seems humorous. It’s paradoxical, surprising, and fun. With growing understanding, you can play with meaningness. You can experiment, improvise, dance with it. Play is enjoyable; you want to take it further. As you discover nebulous patterns, you begin to create, to make new meanings.

As I said, this causal sequence is not true. It’s not false, either. It’s a sometimes-useful way of conceptualizing the relationships among textures that ultimately are not ordered, or even separate.

  • Each of the textures depends on all the others, and feeds all the others.
  • We’re always already in the middle of things, so we may find ourselves in any texture unpredictably, as circumstances arise.
  • Each of the textures springs from the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern, and those aren’t quantifiable. Everything is always entirely nebulous and entirely patterned. “More nebulous” or “more patterned” is nonsense, looked at that way.

Three-way parallelisms

We can conceptualize the textures another way, based on taking three as primary: wonder, play and creation. Then we treat the others as aspects of the primaries: curiosity and humor as aspects of wonder, and enjoyment as an aspect of play.

This rather artificial scheme enables parallels between the three primary textures; the three false promises of eternalism↗︎︎; and the three main emotional dynamics of nihilism↗︎︎. These parallels are also somewhat artificial, due to the nebulosity of all these categories, but may make conceptual connections that aid understanding.

Looked at this way:

  • Wonder is nebulous patterns of understanding, where eternalism promises complete understanding
  • Play is nebulous patterns of control, where eternalism promises complete control
  • Creation goes beyond the already-defined into the nebulously knowable, where eternalism promises complete certainty.

In each of these you can see how the texture corrects eternalism by restoring recognition of the nebulosity it denied↗︎︎—while still retaining pattern. So these textures can serve as antidotes↗︎︎ to the appeal of eternalism’s false promises.

Likewise, we find parallels for the nihilistic dynamics that deny pattern:

  • Wonder is an antidote to nihilistic intellectualization, which tries to stop you from perceiving and understanding patterns of meaningfulness
  • Play is an antidote to nihilistic depression, which tries to cut you off from acting on patterns of control
  • Creation is an antidote to nihilistic rage, which tries to destroy patterns of meaning.

A further series of parallels relates wonder, play, and creation with thinking, feeling, and acting:

  • Curiosity and humor, which are aspects of wonder, are ways of thinking that allow patterns to be nebulous, rather than fixating them
  • Enjoyment of the dance of nebulosity and pattern, which is an aspect of play, is the characteristic feeling of the complete stance
  • Creation, which conjures patterns from nebulosity, is the characteristic activity of the complete stance.1
  • 1. Buddhists will recognize a further parallel with the trikaya. This is particularly clear in the Dzogchen presentation of the trikaya as dang, rolpa, and tsal. Each of these words has many meanings in Tibetan, and so is untranslatable except in context. However, dang can mean “openness” or “clarity”; rolpa most often means “play”; and tsal can mean “creativity.” (I’ve spelled these words phonetically. If you want to look them up in a dictionary, they are gdangs, rol pa, and rtsal. Many letters in Tibetan spelling are silent.)

Wonder

Peak view

Wondrous perceptual field at Schiehallion peak, courtesy↗︎︎ greenzowie

Our aim here is to understand wonder as a texture of the complete stance↗︎︎.

In wonder, you perceive nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎ simultaneously, and impose neither meaningfulness or meaninglessness. (That’s what “the complete stance” means.) We’ll look at what wonder is, what it implies, and what its value may be. And we’ll discuss how to cultivate wonder as a method for adopting↗︎︎, maintaining↗︎︎, and stabilizing↗︎︎ the complete stance; and as a prerequisite for other textures such as curiosity, play, and creation.

Awe, wonder, nebulosity, and pattern

Misty mountain hop

Schiehallion’s flanks “girdled in modesty: clouds below, rocks above↗︎︎.” Image courtesy↗︎︎ Don MacCauley

Recall that a good way to understand the complete stance is by comparison with peak experiences. That works here:

Wonder is to the complete stance as awe is to peak experiences.

So what is awe? An influential psychological study found that it consists of perceiving overwhelmingness plus incomprehensibility.1 It can be experienced as either ecstatic or terrifying, depending on whether the vastness, the overwhelmingness, seems threatening. The emotional intensity of awe motivates you to make sense of the experience; to expand your horizons to admit its meaning. That is what gives peak experiences their transformational power.2

I suggest that wonder occurs in heightened agendaless attention combined with suspension of habitual interpretation. Heightened agendaless attention allows and perceives unexpected patterning; suspension of habitual interpretation allows and perceives unexpected nebulosity. This is what makes it a texture of the complete stance: recall that the stance consists in recognizing pattern and nebulosity inseparably.

“Agendaless attention” means that you are not looking or listening for anything in particular. Wonder is not wondering. Instead, you appreciate the vividness of pattern, the fascinating richness. That is what draws and heightens your attention. Wonder appreciates phenomena just as they are, for their own sake, not for some external value. It is a non-instrumental attitude. (We’ll come back to this as a major theme in the play page, and then again in the complete stance for purpose.)

“Habitual interpretation” is the usually-automatic, unthinking, barely noticed, nearly-instantaneous perceptual process that assigns meanings to phenomena, or dismisses them as meaningless. Eternalism is hard to overcome because we normally see meanings, as if they were objectively given.3 We see vomit on the sidewalk as revolting, a smile as flirtatious, a bit of fluff on the carpet as meaningless. Suspending interpretation means allowing meaningness↗︎︎: neither imposing nor opposing meaning; leaving it alone as it is, not messing with it. Wonder grants instant freedom from metaphysical confusions: not because you resolve them conceptually, but because you have set aside their implications.

Now we can understand awe more precisely: as forced wonder. Overwhelmingness compels attention, and makes it agendaless by eliminating any possibility of effective action. Incomprehensibility makes habitual interpretations impossible. Thus, in awe it is impossible not to perceive pattern and nebulosity simultaneously.

As this page progresses, we’ll see ways wonder differs from awe in terms of the points of contrast between the complete stance and peak experiences:4

  • Awe is rare—because overwhelming, incomprehensible situations are usually dangerous, or else soon become overly familiar. Wonder can occur frequently.
  • Awe’s overwhelming emotions and its incomprehension prevent conceptual thought. It can be stupefying as it occurs, though it may motivate subsequent work at understanding. Wonder may involve intricate conceptual thinking (or not).
  • Wonder can be quite quiet, so it may even go unnoticed.
  • Wonder, unlike awe, can be practiced as a deliberate method.
  • Wonder enables gradual transformation, rather than sudden radical rebirth.

Everyday wonder

Spider web against scallop shell

Wonder is a natural way of being. It’s not esoteric or special. You may often adopt it briefly, without even noticing—if you don’t recognize its significance, and don’t know what to look for.

Let’s do an example. There’s a black scallop shell in the corner of my window. I noticed, from across the room, the sun glinting on the web a spider had built across it. There was a moment of revulsion at the mess—but, without thinking, I suspended that habitual interpretation.

Unexpected beauty had captured my attention. Walking across to the window, spots of dust stuck to strands of the web were glittering. (I’m afraid the photo does not accurately show the effect, due to camera limitations. Maybe you can supply the gleam from memories of similar scenes.)

Like stars in the night sky. I stopped and just looked, enjoying their brilliance, for perhaps a second or less.

It occurred to me then that the bejeweled spider-strands looked like galaxy filaments↗︎︎, the largest known structures in the universe.

Rotating image of the cosmic web

Web of galaxy filaments: simulation and visualization by Andrey Kravtsov and Anatoly Klypin↗︎︎, NCSA

Wonder is intrinsic, non-referential; it involves no external purpose. In the moment, none of this was either meaningful or meaningless. Not the visual activity of my eyes moving from point to point, not the feeling of unexpected enjoyment, not the conceptual analogy between dust motes and galaxies. These were just present, as-they-were—because my heightened attention was agendaless.

If I had not been writing about wonder, I would have left them there. The entire event took only seconds, and I would immediately have forgotten it. Meaningfulness and meaninglessness were equally irrelevant.

As wonder is a texture of the complete stance, eternalism and nihilism are both naturally opposed to it.

  • The eternalist impulse is to turn this into something special: a Meaningful Experience. A dualist↗︎︎ eternalist might say this was a moment of grace, granted by God, revealing the majesty of His Creation. A monist↗︎︎ eternalist might say I had a profound revelation of the unity of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm; “as above, so below↗︎︎.” A physics crank might invent some theory about how the cosmic web is causally similar to a spider’s.

  • The nihilist impulse is to dismiss it as obviously meaningless. Spider webs are utterly mundane and ordinary. They have nothing in common with the large-scale structure of the universe, apart from a purely coincidental and superficial visual similarity. There is, as a matter of objective fact, no meaningful connection between dust specks and galaxies. This whole thing was a straightforward cognitive error, embroidered into an emotional fantasy, in order to preserve the delusion that life has some sort of “meaning” beyond animals being wired up to maximize their evolutionary fitness.

Both these impulses terminate wonder as soon as it you notice it, inhibiting the natural process.

On the other hand, if you don’t notice wonder when it arises spontaneously, then you don’t cut it off by reflex—but maybe you don’t get much benefit from it, either.

In this case, wonder lasted perhaps three seconds. I had seen what there was to be seen. I walked away.

But it turned out that there was meaning in it after all. In wonder, there is no external purpose; but a minute later, it occurred to me to use the example here. Perhaps it will help you notice your own moments of everyday wonder.

The overview of textures explained that wonder leads to curiosity, and then to humor, and play, and enjoyment, and creation. I hope you can see how each of those contributed to the writing of this little story.

Feelings of wonder

All stances↗︎︎ have thinking, feeling, and activity aspects, which pervade their textures. The previous section explained wonder’s activity aspect, consisting just of heightened attention and the suspension (non-activity!5) of interpretation. Here I’ll cover feelings typical of wonder; then we’ll do thinking in the next section.

Spaciousness is the feeling of release from the bounds of fixed↗︎︎ meaning.

Fixed↗︎︎ meanings are claustrophobic. “Ugh, dirty, and I’m stuck in a house6 full of spiders, they’re creepy, maybe poisonous, I don’t want to have to clean this up, it’s a hassle, I don’t have time for it, I have other stupid stuff I have to do.” All that in a fraction of a second: not as thoughts articulated in words, but as the overall, oppressive gestalt of the encounter.

The routine meanings of a situation block your view of it. Habitual categorization suppresses details; it dulls the senses. I felt shut in a small box, confined in space and time and possibilities for action. But bright sunlight drew my attention sharply, my perception became agendaless, I saw vivid details I would otherwise have overlooked, and so other meanings were revealed.

Re-seeing the web as beautiful, the usual interpretations fell away. It’s not that I realized they were untrue—all my complaints were true, pretty much. It’s that they were suspended; ceased to have any relevance.

Aesthetic appreciation, fascination with beauty in its intricate specificity, typically accompanies wonder. Heightened agendaless attention can perceive the unexpected, which reveals freshness: whatever you see, hear, smell, taste or touch is unique, not merely another instance of a familiar category. Wonder is almost synonymous with amazement, astonishment, and perplexity. Reality is a delicious surprise. Not a surprise as in “maybe this will happen, or maybe that, but I expect this”—and then you get that. Surprise as in “I couldn’t have imagined this beforehand.”

Wonder is the feeling of accepting contact with nebulosity. Wonder requires willingness to allow chaos, uncertainty, ambiguity, discontinuity, meaninglessness.

Wonder is ambivalent. In wonder, there are no set boundaries, and the world opens up into vastness. That can come as a release and a relief; or you may feel agoraphobia. You realize nothing is altogether solid, and that groundlessness provokes vertigo. If eternalism or nihilism is habitual, wonder’s open-endedness—its non-confirmation of your stance toward meaning—seems threatening.7 That’s why there’s an immediate urge to shut it down by insisting that whatever is happening is either meaningful or meaningless, rather than letting it be.

The confused stances↗︎︎ are defenses against the anxiety of nebulosity. Stabilizing the complete stance involves learning from practice how and when you can tolerate it—or enjoy it.

That is the cost of freedom. It is the exit toll you pay for stepping out of a musty, dingy box into a bigger, brighter, stranger world. It is the price for freshness, appreciation, and insight. Wonder is the prerequisite too for curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation; they rest on clouds. They are often joyful, but inevitably also sometimes queasy.

Wonder and insight

Studies of awe have found that it can be provoked by conceptual vastness, just as by perceptual vastness. Encountering an overwhelmingly powerful, initially incomprehensible intellectual system can blow you away.8 You recognize that its vast sweep implies you will be forced to reevaluate much of what you thought you understood—which might radically change how you think, feel, and act—but specifically what requires revision is obscure until you have assimilated it.

Let’s call the analog of conceptual awe “intellectual wonder.” As a response to incomprehensibility, we can contrast it with wondering and with bafflement. Wondering has a specific question in mind, and expects a specific form of answer. (I’ll call this “closed-ended curiosity” on the next page.) It may involve heightened attention, but does not suspend habitual interpretations. Bafflement is the inability to even get started on making sense. Familiar meanings are suspended because they’re obviously irrelevant, but you cannot bring conceptual attention to bear, so you are incurious. Intellectual wonder recognizes that your existing systems of meaning cannot encompass the new one, so you must suspend your usual ways of thinking. Simultaneously, the new one is fascinating, so it draws your attention to its intricate details; but you don’t yet know what to attend to, so it is agendaless. (This leads naturally to “open-ended curiosity,” which is similar, but more active, directed.)

Suspending interpretation gives space for unexpected alternative meanings to emerge. That is insight.

Understanding gained from wonder is nebulous, especially initially. The complete stance recognizes that all understanding is nebulous—whereas complete understanding is a false promise of eternalism. However, the new meanings emerging in wonder should later be tested and reconciled with one’s other, more solid understandings. Apparent insights may be productive, or not. The spider web/cosmic web analogy was spurious and unproductive (other than for its use here). A famously valuable example was August Kekulé’s breakthrough understanding of the chemical structure of benzene in a dream↗︎︎ of the ouroboros—a snake biting its own tail.9

Insight opens new possibilities for action: alternative responses to situations and feelings. This points the way into the more active textures of the complete stance. You are freed for curiosity, play, and creation.

Wonder as a method

To the extent that you have stabilized the complete stance, its six textures often occur naturally and effortlessly. Short of that, the textures can also be used as methods for adopting↗︎︎ and stabilizing↗︎︎ it.

Wonder is the most receptive, least active texture, so it’s harder to apply deliberately than the others. You can’t just say “right, I’ll do an hour’s worth of wonder now, and then have lunch.” (Or anyway I can’t!)

That there is no specific method for producing wonder may contribute to the misleading and counterproductive sense of specialness around it. It helps to consider it no big deal; something to enjoy when it occurs, but not something to try to hold onto, crank up artificially, or make a fuss about after the fact.

On the other hand, wonder is not a subjective experience;10 it’s not something that just happens to you, like awe. It does have subtle doing components: attention and suspension.

The circumstances conducive for awe may also produce wonder. Going to a concert just in order to find wonder might be slightly silly (or not!). But if you are going to one anyway, you could maintain background awareness that wonder (or awe) might occur, and intend to notice and allow it if it does.

So in fact the method for wonder is: wonder at wonder! Recall that wonder is heightened agendaless attention plus suspension of interpretation. When wonder occurs, maintain heightened agendaless attention to attention itself, and suspend interpretation of suspended interpretation. Attention to attention intensifies wonder. Suspension of interpretation of interpretation allows it to persist. (If you think “oh, yes, I seem to have suspended interpretation, so this must be wonder, which means I’m adopting the complete stance, so the next thing is, I have to figure out what ‘the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern’ is supposed to mean”—then the moment is lost, and wonder collapses into a fixed system of conceptual interpretation you read about on some website.)

Noticing wonder requires knowing what it is like: the associated thoughts, feelings, and (in)actions. I hope this page gives a preliminary, conceptual sense of that. Practice develops a non-conceptual familiarity, which is more reliable.

Many meditation methods that aim at “emptiness”—nebulosity, roughly—train you to suspend interpretation. These do seem to facilitate wonder. It is possible to decide to suspend interpretation for an hour before lunch.

There are meditation methods that train you in heightened attention—including, in some cases, attention to attention. However, nearly all aim at single-pointed focus for a particular purpose. I do not know of one that specifically trains you in the agendaless attention that wanders about according to its evolving fascinations.11 The poet Robert Bly recommends training in art appreciation for this purpose; he describes it as “sharpening the senses by labor↗︎︎.”

An experiment in wonder

Altazimuth theodolite (same as a zenith sector, but two-axis)

Want to do an experiment?

I’ll tell you a story that gave me a moment of intellectual wonder. It may or may not for you!

What I suggest is that, as you read it, you maintain awareness of the possibility of noticing heightened, agendaless, conceptual attention, and the possibility of suspending of your usual understanding. At a certain point in the story, you may notice a slightly uncanny frisson of disorientation. Then, metaphorically, your ears may suddenly prick up—you may find yourself fascinated. Your mind may dart in all directions looking for answers, or you may want to read on as quickly as possible. I suggest instead that you stop for a moment then, and pay attention to the feelings, and what you are thinking, and what you are wanting to do. Then proceed slowly, dividing your attention between the story and watching your own attention and interpretation. And allow the story to not make sense for a moment, but do not attempt to make your allowing incomprehension to mean anything itself.

In 1765, surveyor Jeremiah Dixon and astronomer Charles Mason of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, set out to survey the Pennsylvania-Maryland border—later known as the Mason-Dixon Line. It took two years to mark the boundary across 233 miles. Through uninhabited wilderness, dense forests, hostile Indian territory, up and down mountains, they made painstaking observations using delicate, state-of-the-art scientific instruments. Mason’s astronomical career was devoted to the most pressing technological challenge of the time: accurately determining one’s geographical position, especially when at sea. The best method involved using a highly accurate clock and fancy telescopes, which they brought.

The boundary was legally defined as running due west from a specific point, so for the survey it was mainly important to get the latitude—the north/south coordinate—right. For this, Mason and Dixon used a zenith sector. That was a six-foot telescope mounted on a wheel, like in the picture above. Tick marks on the wheel told them the telescope’s angle from straight up. The wheel was mounted on a tripod that they adjusted to verticality using a plumb bob—a weight on a string that points straight down. By locating stars in the telescope, checking their angles from the vertical, and consulting tables that said where they should appear at what time of night, they could determine their position. As a simplified example, as you go north, the pole star appears to move higher above the horizon, and closer to the zenith—the point in the sky directly above you.

From first principles, they calculated that their position error should not be more than fifty feet. Yet over the course of the survey, they repeatedly found anomalies of several hundred feet. They attributed this to imprecision in the instruments, which they corrected by taking multiple measurements and averaging. Or so they thought! But they were wrong. In fact, the line they laid out does repeatedly veer hundreds of feet off from straight east-west.12 And not at random…

When Mason got back to Greenwich, his boss, the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, suspected a different explanation. Newton’s theory of gravitation had been thoroughly confirmed as applying to planets. In principle, it was supposed to apply to any sufficiently large object, but there was no evidence for this. However, physicists had calculated that it should be just barely possible to measure the gravitational force exerted by a mountain using instruments as precise as were then available. Maskelyne guessed that the anomalies Mason and Dixon noted were due partly to the Allegheny Ranges, which they repeatedly crossed. Mountains to the immediate north or south of their path had sucked the plumb bob sideways, toward themselves. That threw off the verticality of the azimuth sector, which did not point straight up as it should.

In 1772, Maskelyne submitted a funding proposal to test the hypothesis.13 Money came through in 1773, and Maskelyne put Mason on the job of finding a suitable mass. Mason chose Schiehallion, an isolated Scottish peak whose nearly-symmetrical conical shape would simplify calculations. Using a ten-foot azimuth sector, Maskelyne confirmed that the mountain did deflect the plumb-bob. This was a spectacular confirmation of Newtonian gravitation. The amount of the deflection, together with the measured geometry of the peak, made it possible to calculate the ratio of the density of mountain rock (which was known) with that of the earth as a whole. This was approximately 5/9. Maskelyne’s colleague Charles Hutton correctly conjectured from this that implied our planet has a metallic core—metals such as iron being much denser than rock.

View of Schiehallion from Loch Rannoch

Schiehallion appearing as a cone; photograph courtesy↗︎︎ Anne Burgess

How did that go for you?

It was a shock for me, learning that the gravitational pull of mountains is so powerful that it got Mason and Dixon hundreds of feet off course. I felt both delight and vertigo, which stopped my mind for a moment. And then learning that Maskelyne could measure this accurately enough with 1770s instruments to get the density of the earth correct to within 20% was another shock. And that earth’s iron core was discovered then…

In elation and vertigo, my curiosity piqued me. These were surprises of the “never would have imagined” sort.14 What else might I be wrong about, if my understanding of gravity and of technological history were so wrong? I spent an entire day reading to find out.

Further reading and further research

My main sources for this page were spider webs and mountain ranges. In other words, it’s based largely on experience.

However, my understanding is rooted in Vajrayana Buddhist theory and practice. “Spacious freedom↗︎︎” is my somewhat idiosyncratic presentation of relevant theory. Roaring Silence↗︎︎, by Ngakpa Chögyam and Khandro Déchen, is a guide to the most relevant introductory meditation practices.

This is at least the third time I’ve tried to write about agendaless perception and suspension of interpretation—although I haven’t used exactly those terms before. Reading the previous two attempts may deepen your understanding by coming at the topic from different angles. “At the Mountains of Meaningness” (2015) is about peak experiences and experiences on literal peaks; about vastness; about the wonder, inspiration, and insight found there; and about the nebulosity of perception, concepts, and action. The “Reopening the senses” section of “Hunting the Shadow↗︎︎” (2017) is about “liberated perception,” which is “discovered through precision,” “in nature, and through art, and especially art that is about perception in nature.”

After mostly finishing this page, I thought I ought to check the academic literature, and found work that was surprisingly interesting. I’ll pass along a bit of what I learned, with citations in case they inspire you to follow up. Also, at the end of this appendix, I’ll suggest a possible line for further research.

“Spaciousness” seems closely related to “openness to experience↗︎︎,” considered one of the five fundamental factors of personality in current empirical research. Studies have found openness correlating with the terms I’ve used for each of the six textures of the complete stance.15

Earlier I footnoted Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt’s “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion↗︎︎,” Cognition and Emotion, 2003, 17(2), pp. 297-314. This is now the classic work on the topic; I took the definition of awe as overwhelmingness plus incomprehensibility from it.16 I also learned from Brent Dean Robbins’ “Joy, Awe, Gratitude and Compassion: Common Ground in a Will-to-Openness↗︎︎,” presented at the conference Works of Love: Religious and Scientific Perspectives on Altruism, 2003.

This lecture by Brian Cantwell Smith is titled “Deference, Humility, and Awe.” It’s mostly not relevant to this page, but he packs about twenty serious, far-reaching, out-of-consensus points into an hour’s talk, any one of which a lesser academic could have made a career out of, so I recommend it highly. He does make the point that you can experience awe entirely within the conceptual domain; he uses the examples of first encountering Gödel’s and Turing’s work on impossible knowledge.

The methods used in classic studies on awe and peak experience would probably no longer pass muster. Researchers basically asked people to tell stories about their memories of long-ago experiences, and looked for commonalities. In the wake of the psychology replication crisis, I suspect this would no longer count as “science.”

Nebula

Awesome image↗︎︎ used by real scientists in an actual experiment↗︎︎

However, more recent research purports to induce awe in the laboratory. The first such study showed people a series of outer space images, played them Sigur Rós’ Hoppípolla, “a song with qualities known to evoke awe,” and asked them how they felt about them. (Paul J. Silvia, et al., “Openness to Experience and Awe in Response to Nature and Music↗︎︎,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 9(4) (2015), pp. 376–384.) The main finding was that openness to experience correlated strongly with self-reports of “awe-like” emotions.

More convincingly, Alice Chirico and her collaborators have used virtual reality (VR) headsets to induce awe, measured physiologically (pulse, skin conductance) as well as by self-report. (Alice Chirico et al., “Effectiveness of Immersive Videos in Inducing Awe↗︎︎,” Scientific Reports 7, 1218 (2017).) They subsequently used computer graphics and virtual reality to create immersive experiences that can manipulate differing aspects of awe—such as “overwhelmingness” and “incomprehensibility”—separately. (Alice Chirico et al., “Designing Awe in Virtual Reality↗︎︎,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2018) 2351.) Another study found that VR-induced awe increases a standard measure of creativity (Alice Chirico, et al., “Awe Enhances Creative Thinking↗︎︎,” Creativity Research Journal, 30:2, 123-131 (2018)).17

I’ve been wondering whether the distinction between wonder and awe could be validated experimentally. I expect inducing wonder in VR is also feasible. (Even my favorite 2D video games seem to do that for me.) How could we verify which is which? One way might be through visual psychophysics: objective measures of what people are looking at and what they see, using for example gaze-tracking cameras and reaction time tests.

My understanding of agendaless perception draws on my understanding of perception with an agenda, which was a main topic↗︎︎ of my work in artificial intelligence. In a well-practiced task, you know what to look for where, because you know what the things you see mean. This can be verified with gaze tracking: experimental subjects focus their attention tightly in predictable, task-relevant places.

In awe and wonder, your routine methods for visual interpretation break down, and you don’t know what to look at. In awe, you are “blown away,” and my guess (based on introspective memory) was that your attention widens to take in the vastness of the entire scene, without looking at anything in particular. I discovered as I was finishing this page that this has just been verified experimentally by Muge Erol and Arien Mack (“Immersive experience of awe increases the scope of visuospatial attention: A VR study↗︎︎,” Journal of Vision September 2019, Vol.19, 285a).

My prediction is that wonder engenders significantly greater visual exploration (as could be measured by gaze tracking), and tighter focus (as could be measured using the methods of Erol and Mack), than awe. However, I would expect the gaze to fixate on inherently salient visual features, rather than task-relevant ones. (Inherent salience is well-understood in visual psychophysics.)

  • 1. This is Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion↗︎︎,” Cognition and Emotion, 2003, 17(2), pp. 297-314. The paper gives both a plausible theory and a useful literature review. Keltner and Haidt use the term “vastness” rather than “overwhelmingness,” but say that a perception of enormous power is typically involved. Rather than “incomprehension,” they use the technical term “accommodation,” meaning “the process of adjusting mental structures that cannot assimilate a new experience.” They write: “awe involves a difficulty in comprehension, along with associated feelings of confusion, surprise, and wonder.” I have found little prior literature on wonder itself.
  • 2. Keltner and Haidt: “We propose that prototypical awe involves a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast. Such experiences can be disorienting and even frightening… They also often involve feelings of enlightenment and even rebirth, when mental structures expand to accommodate truths never before known. We stress that awe involves a need for accommodation, which may or may not be satisfied… Awe can transform people and reorient their lives, goals, and values…. Awe-inducing events may be one of the fastest and most powerful methods of personal change and growth.”
  • 3. The “Meaningful perception” chapter of In the Cells of the Eggplant explains this.
  • 4. My distinction between “awe” and “wonder” was a terminological choice, not necessarily an analysis of the way the words are commonly used. That is, I wanted to make a distinction, and by fiat I’ve used these two related words to do so. “Awe” and “wonder” are not clearly distinct in common usage, nor in most of the academic literature I’ve read. However, the one relevant study I’ve found (after nearly finishing writing this page) confirms the distinction I’d drawn. Relative to “awe,” “wonder” is described with fewer words implying intense positive emotion, less certainty, more cognition, more perceptual work, and more curiosity. Kathleen E. Darbor et al., “Experiencing versus contemplating: Language use during descriptions of awe and wonder↗︎︎,” Cognition and Emotion, ePub 2015.
  • 5. Remember that I’m presenting the textures in order from wonder, which is the least active, to creation, the most.
  • 6. I’m writing this during quarantine for COVID in April 2020.
  • 7. Religious awe can be terrifying—the mysterium tremendum of the numinous↗︎︎. The uncanny is more-or-less wonder plus anxiety. As I wrote in “We are all monsters↗︎︎,” “Uncanniness is the experience of conceptual interpretation breaking down. Spookiness is frightening unpredictability and alienness—mixed with familiarity. Nothing can be more familiar than ourselves; and yet there are times when we find ourselves alien, chaotic, and confusing.”
  • 8. Keltner and Haidt use as examples psychoanalysis, feminism, and evolutionary theory. Each of those did blow me away when I first learned about them. YMMV.
  • 9. I was disappointed to read, while researching this page, that Kekulé’s story about this insight may have been fictional or a joke.
  • 10. Of course you do experience wonder, as you do any other activity, and it does have specific associated feelings, as we’ve seen. Wonder is not an experience in the same sense that washing dishes is not “an experience.”
  • 11. It seems that Dzogchen ought to have a method of this sort. It is in the spirit of the Four Chog-Zhag. Maybe there is such a method, and I don’t know about it.
  • 12. For gloriously more geeky details, see Robert Mentzer’s “How Mason and Dixon ran their line↗︎︎.”
  • 13. His proposal was to the Royal Society, which formed the Committee of Attraction to decide whether it was worth spending an awful lot of money on. Benjamin Franklin was among the members of the Committee.
  • 14. It’s plausible that a contributing factor is the orders of magnitude difference in size between the earth, the mountain, and the plumb bob. This conveys spatial vastness conceptually, which—just as when it is perceived visually—can often induce awe.
  • 15. So you might wonder whether “the complete stance” isn’t just another term for openness to experience. It’s not. Openness can make it easier to tolerate nebulosity, but doesn’t ensure you understand accurately the many ways it interacts with pattern. Monists↗︎︎ are typically extremely open to experience, yet monism is inimical to the complete stance. The confused stances mission and Romantic rebellion also seem, anecdotally, to correlate with openness.
  • 16. Keltner and Haidt’s model is similar to several earlier ones they review. One they don’t mention is Rudolph Otto’s 1917 explanation of “the numinous↗︎︎” as a mystery (mysterium) that is at once terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans).
  • 17. The effect size in the creativity study data is enormous. Potentially extremely exciting, so I’d like to see it replicated.

Open-ended curiosity

Open-ended curiosity is a texture of the complete stance↗︎︎. It flows naturally from understanding the inseparability of nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎. Open-ended curiosity avoids fixating↗︎︎ meaningness↗︎︎ into pre-determined categories.

Confused attitudes to mystery

Open-ended curiosity is a stance↗︎︎ toward not-knowing. It is easiest to understand by contrast with some other stances.

Generally each dimension of meaningness gets its own chapter in Doing meaning better, the main part of this book. For knowledge, we can just do a quick version here, enough to make sense of “open-ended curiosity” as a texture of the complete stance. (In The Cells of the Eggplant is a whole book expanding on this. Or, “Upgrade your cargo cult for the win” is a long essay version.)

So, let’s apply the familiar Meaningness scheme!

That begins by identifying a metaphysical error that generates pairs of confused stances↗︎︎. In the case of knowledge, it is the assumption that it must be perfectly definite. As usual, this is a denial↗︎︎ of nebulosity↗︎︎.

Ignorance denied

There are no mysteries; this Holy Book / sacred institution / omniscient guru has all the answers.

Outright denial of unknowing is the simplest confused stance. This is typical of eternalistic dualism. The most obvious examples are simplistic versions of the Biblical religions. This is also the stance of simple versions of scientistic rationalism, which is also a dualist eternalism. Outright denial of ignorance is hard to maintain↗︎︎ because, for many questions, no authority does have a plausible answer.

A more sophisticated version admits that answers are not always immediately available, but claims that there is a guaranteed method for finding them. That might be some type of prayer, in the religious case; or The Scientific Method, for scientism. If it doesn’t seem to get an answer, it’s because you are doing it wrong; but there are experts who can do it right. Learning to be an expert might take special talents and many years of apprenticeship.

Eventually you may realize that experts also can’t reliably find answers. You may discover that there is no “The” scientific method; and for many fields, no set method is available at all.

Research on how college students’ attitudes toward knowledge develop finds that they often arrive with “there are no mysteries,” realize that is wrong, and switch to “but there is a method.” Later, some students also figure out that there are no consistently reliable methods—typically only in graduate school.1

Wonder is the antidote to the denial of the nebulosity of knowing. It involves receptivity and gentleness. Clear thinking is good, but your mind should not be so sharp that it cuts your own throat. Aggressive precision is a common failure of dualism. It traps you in a cage of certainty. It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

Ignorance fixated

We are the keepers of the Eternal Sacred Mystery about which knowledge is impossible, so it is taboo to enquire.

This stance reacts to the nebulosity of meaning by denying patterns↗︎︎ of knowledge. It is typical of monist↗︎︎ eternalism, such as the New Age and some versions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.

Consistent with monism, this stance usually gloms together all questions without answers, and treats them as a unified Cosmic Mystery. Then it gives some vague and incoherent, but holy and comforting, interpretation to the aggregate. For example, “we all partake of the nature of Cosmic Consciousness, which is the Whole Universe becoming aware of Itself, so the Cosmic Mystery is really↗︎︎ Knowing.”2

The antidote to monist eternalism is demanding specific answers to specific questions. Derisive scorn may be helpful if they are not forthcoming. This is an appropriation↗︎︎ of dualist nihilist rage!

However, denying pattern and fixating non-existence is typical of nihilism, and there is a nihilistic version of this stance. It’s more sophisticated than the monist-eternalist version. It says that knowledge is impossible, and that this is a cause and/or result of meaninglessness. When challenged, the 190-proof version usually falls back on the Lite version: “real↗︎︎ knowledge” is impossible. Cognitive development research finds that students commonly adopt↗︎︎ this stance after realizing that no entirely reliable methods can exist. There’s a humanities version, which is postmodern hyper-relativism, and a STEM version, which is post-rational depression.

The antidote to this stance is diligent investigation. Openness is good, but you should not be so open-minded that your brain falls out. Refusal of judgement, on grounds of principle, is a common failure of both monists and nihilists. It leaves you open to dangerous memetic parasites.

A muddled middle

When it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that an authority has answers for some questions and not others, a muddled middle↗︎︎ emerges. Some matters are certain, so the authority is not to be questioned; others are holy mysteries, so the authority is not to be questioned.

Some Christian sects give detailed, Absolute Truth From God answers for innumerable minor issues; but the big questions—the critical contradictions such as theodicy, the trinity, and the nature of the eucharist—get glommed together into Divine Mystery.

Some supposed sciences do the same. Representationalist cognitive “science” develops elaborate theories of particular sorts of thinking; but you are not allowed to ask about critical contradictions, such as how a physical thing can “represent” something it is causally disconnected from, how you can find out whether or not something is a representation, or what scientific tests can determine what one represents. (Representationalism is particularly harmful when meanings themselves are wrongly claimed↗︎︎ to be mental representations.)

Typical of muddled middles, this stance fails to eliminate the underlying metaphysical error: that proper knowledge must be perfectly definite. It just tries to apply each of a mirror-image pair of confused stances in different cases. Accordingly, it has the defects of both. It proliferates spuriously definite “knowledge” that is quite wrong, and it makes you vulnerable to vague mystical memes.

It’s common to fall into this trap when first emerging from post-rationalist nihilism. You take Science too seriously as a reliable theory of some things, while simultaneously adopting mystical woo as an approach to others.

Closed-ended curiosity

Closed-ended curiosity recognizes that some things are known, and some things are not. It may recognize degrees for confidence or certainty in knowledge. It may recognize that there are no fixed ways of answering some questions.

Curiosity is closed-ended when it wrongly assumes that answers, when and if found, must be definite. This is the same metaphysical error again.

“Definite” does not mean “certain.” Certainty is your opinion about a statement. Definiteness is about the nature of the statement itself, and about its relationship with the world. A properly definite statement would be perfectly clear, and so either true or false in reality—even if we cannot know which.3

Closed-end curiosity assumes that conceptual structures, such as taxonomies, either fit the world or don’t. It tries to find answers to well-defined questions, in terms of a fixed system; to locate missing pieces of a puzzle whose shape and meaning you already know.

Closed-end curiosity is valuable; it is a proper mode of routine science, routine engineering, and routine organizational management. It is not a mode of the complete stance, though.

Open-ended curiosity

Open-ended curiosity resolves the metaphysical error by dancing with the inseparable nebulosity and pattern of knowing. That is what makes it a texture of the complete stance.

Open-ended curiosity asks: “I wonder what this is like?” “I wonder whether some meaning will emerge here?” “I wonder how this works—what possibilities for action it may offer?” It is open, particularly, to possibilities that are shut off by any fixed system of interpretation.

Open-ended curiosity actively seeks examples of pattern and nebulosity intertwined. Those are the source of understanding.

An understanding is a way of being; nebulous but effective patterns of thinking, feeling, and interacting. An understanding is not a collection of statements that might be definitely true or false.

Open-ended curiosity is not centrally concerned with answers, or with questions. Those can be important, but they come after understanding.4

Open-ended curiosity does not assume the form of an answer. It does not assume there is any answer, nor that questions are necessarily meaningful. It is comfortable with formlessness and meaninglessness. It is willing to be confused, and willing to allow confusion to persist. When a phenomenon stubbornly refuses to make sense, open-ended curiosity neither jumps to judgement, nor rejects it as boring or frightening. It allows both meanings and meaninglessness to be however they are.

Open-ended curiosity recognizes that you don’t have to have an opinion about everything—or even most things. It also does not shun judgement when a clear pattern emerges. And then, it does not regard any conclusions as final.

Open-ended curiosity gives you the freedom to interact with the world without metaphysical presuppositions. That interaction gives your self the freedom to be unconstrained metaphysically as well: to be solid or insubstantial, sharp or fuzzy, distinct from the world or absorbed in it, enduring or transient, defined or vague.

Because it does not presume any system, open-ended curiosity means not having to do things by the book. That does not imply that it is passive, or that it rejects all structure or methods, or that it is some sort of mystical intuition. In the Cells of the Eggplant spends a hundred pages explaining how to apply open-ended curiosity in professional, technical work.

As a method of stabilizing the complete stance, open-ended curiosity takes intelligence, hard work, and generosity—as well as just openness

As a texture of the complete stance, it is natural, effortless, and joyful.

  • 1. This is the line of research initiated by William G. Perry↗︎︎. A useful review is Barbara K. Hofer and Paul R. Pintrich, “The Development of Epistemological Theories: Beliefs About Knowledge and Knowing and Their Relation to Learning,” Review of Educational Research, Spring 1997, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 88-140.
  • 2. Quantum woo is a common, egregious version of this monist misunderstanding of mystery.
  • 3. There aren’t any fully definite statements, outside of mathematics. This is a big problem for rationalist↗︎︎ epistemology↗︎︎. The Eggplant devotes a chapter to this—but it’s not yet published as of the time I’m publishing this page. In the mean time, if you are feeling masochistic, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Propositions↗︎︎” demonstrates how difficult the problems are, and how convoluted the responses.
  • 4. Another way of putting this is that open-ended curiosity is ontological↗︎︎, where closed-ended curiosity is epistemological↗︎︎. I’m avoiding these philosophical polysyllables at this point in Meaningness; they become central in The Eggplant. As a historical note, “understanding precedes representation” was a central slogan of Phil Agre’s and my work in artificial intelligence.

Humor

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Humor—both in the sense of laughing at a joke, and of “good humor”—is a characteristic texture of the complete stance↗︎︎.

Humor closely connects with:

  • Ambiguity
  • Paradox
  • Absurdity
  • Surprise
  • A sudden recognition that a situation can be seen differently
  • Noticing cognitive errors
  • Not taking adversity personally

All these come with the recognition of the inseparability of pattern↗︎︎ and nebulosity↗︎︎, which is the definition of the complete stance.

Play

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Playfulness is a characteristic texture of activity in the complete stance↗︎︎.

Enjoying the dance of nebulosity and pattern

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Nebulosity↗︎︎ often seems unwelcome. To maintain↗︎︎ the complete stance↗︎︎, one must actively enjoy it—in its intertwining dance with pattern↗︎︎.

Creation

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Creation is the characteristic activity of the complete stance↗︎︎; its densest texture.

Stabilizing the complete stance

Workers on a bamboo scaffolding

Photo courtesy↗︎︎ CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

Difficult to attain, easy to maintain

We slide into confused stances↗︎︎ effortlessly, often without even noticing. They are unstable, though: as soon as it becomes obvious that one is wrong, we switch to another. Even if we commit↗︎︎ to one, perhaps as part of an ideological system, we find they are difficult to maintain↗︎︎. They collide with reality often enough that stabilizing↗︎︎ them requires great effort.

The complete stance↗︎︎ tends the opposite way: it is difficult to attain, but with practice becomes relatively easy to maintain.1Obstacles to the complete stance” explained several reasons it is difficult to attain, access, or adopt↗︎︎.

However, once you become familiar with the complete stance, it is relatively easy to maintain, because it is accurate. Unlike the confused stances, experience does not contradict it.

Put another way, we adopt the confused stances mainly because they seem the only ones available. In each particular situation, we choose the least bad one, despite our being more-or-less aware of its defects. Once the complete stance becomes accessible, confusions seem decreasingly attractive.

What does it mean to stabilize the complete stance?

The complete stance is a stance↗︎︎, meaning that it’s an attitude and mode of activity one adopts in response to a specific problem of meaningness↗︎︎ as it arises. Like other stances, it’s typically transient and may go unnoticed. It is not a permanent accomplishment, once and done.

To stabilize↗︎︎ a stance means putting in place structures and strategies that support your commitment↗︎︎ to it by making it easier to maintain↗︎︎.

This page largely reviews the book’s introductory explanation of how confused and complete stances work. Now you can understand the same material more deeply, having worked through detailed explanations of the dynamics of some specific confused stances: eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎.

For example, you’ve read how we stabilize eternalism and nihilism using eternalist ploys or nihilist evasions. You’ve also read about ways specific antidotes↗︎︎ and counter-thoughts can destabilize those strategies.

Stabilizing completion through understanding, rejecting, and destabilizing confusions

Confused stances rest on metaphysical errors; complete stances resolve↗︎︎ them. In the case of eternalism and nihilism, the error is the shared mistaken belief that only fixed meanings could be real. Clear conceptual understanding of how and why this is wrong, and of its harmful consequences, stabilizes the complete stance. Once you accept that it is wrong, you can explicitly commit↗︎︎ to the complete stance, and reject↗︎︎ its alternatives.

This conceptual understanding and commitment could be mere philosophical theory, however, lacking practical effect. Translating understanding into changes in your way of being requires experiential familiarity with stance dynamics: their characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. It also requires enough practice in applying the concepts that it becomes habitual.

Eternalism, nihilism, and the complete stance are all mutually exclusive. Any reason to adopt one is reason to reject the other two. Therefore, all the antidotes that destabilize eternalism and nihilism are methods for stabilizing the complete stance.2 This is true particularly inasmuch as the complete stance can be defined simply as “refraining from both eternalism and nihilism.”

Practical understanding of confused stances means involves familiarity with their characteristic thoughts—the ploys and evasions—and skill in deploying the counter-thoughts. It means recognizing the sale pitches, noticing how you get sucked in by their emotional promises, and knowing how to decline them: reminding yourself they cannot deliver. It means learning their textures of activity: the self-blinded destructive rampages of armed eternalism and nihilistic rage, for example.

Stabilizing completion through familiarity with stance transitions

Familiarity with the patterns of transition between stages builds on familiarity with individual ones. In “Stances are unstable” and “Exiting eternalism” I gave examples.

One observes the recurring patterns of shifts from one unstable stance to the next. What triggers these changes? Generically, one slides out of a stance when it stops making sense of a situation, and another becomes available as an alternative. Doing meaning better—the main part of Meaningness—explains this, for many different stance pairs, in as much detail as seems feasible. However, noticing these patterns in a specific situation takes practice. Also, everyone’s patterns are somewhat different, according to habit and personality.

As you gain familiarity with how this goes, you can intervene at each point, and nudge yourself toward the complete stance, rather than sliding around among confused ones. Eventually, you may gain understanding of the full web of possible transitions. You quickly recognize moments at which a confused stance becomes unstable because it stops making sense of a situation, and what antidote to apply. You also recognize moments at which the complete stance becomes unstable—usually because it points to unwelcome nebulosity↗︎︎—and you know what to do to stabilize it.3

Simply noticing that you feel confused, and remembering that the complete stance is a better alternative, is often all that is needed.

Noticing and maintaining the complete stance

The complete stance is quite natural, and everyone occasionally adopts it, briefly, usually without noticing.

It is not a special state of consciousness.4 There are feelings that typically accompany it, but they are not dramatically distinctive. They may accompany other stances as well. This makes it hard to recognize.

“Have I already adopted the complete stance in this situation?” is a good question to ask.

If, on consideration, the answers are both “no,” then you have indeed already adopted the complete stance.

Finding the complete stance repeatedly, and then paying attention to the thoughts, feelings, and activity that accompany it, stabilizes it. That is, familiarity makes it easier to maintain↗︎︎ in the face of temptations to drop into confusion.

Textures of complete activity” describes what the complete stance is like. You can use these descriptions as methods: are things going like that now? How can I nudge them more in that direction?

Stabilizing the complete stance through commitment and practice

If you understand conceptually how the complete stance is accurate, and find its benefits attractive, you may choose to commit↗︎︎ to it. Then you will find yourself wavering↗︎︎: you cannot always maintain the stance, despite good intentions. Sometimes you will catch yourself having wandered off into eternalism or nihilism, or some Lite version of them, for a while. Perhaps moments; perhaps months.

The antidote to wavering commitment to the complete stance is: wavering commitment to the complete stance. That is, increasing stability comes with practice. Commitment to any stance—an enduring determination to adopt it whenever it may be relevant—is a powerful method for stabilization. You put effort into maintaining it, and develop skill at strategies for doing so.

The usual way to commit to a stance is indirectly, by committing to a system. Systems are easier to commit to because there’s more structure and narrative detail to latch onto. A competent system also comes with powerful stabilization tricks. For example, committing to Christianity provides you with numerous methods for maintaining eternalism. They include thoughts such as recollecting points of a catechism; feelings such as fear, love, or trust in God; and activities such as participation in the sacramental rites.

Systems are not available for stabilizing the complete stance.5 So, for now at least, we can only commit directly to the stance itself.

Meaningness provides a somewhat systematic presentation, but is far short of a full-blown system such as a religion or political ideology. Perhaps one would be impossible, because systems generally fixate distinctions, and the complete stance rejects that. Any presentation must be somewhat nebulous, because the subject matter is, in part, nebulosity itself.6 A detailed presentation of the complete stance is also difficult because it is so abstract and general. Complete stances, plural, for particular dimensions of meaningness, are more specific, so there is more to say. (Coming up!)

Accomplishing the complete stance

I wrote above that the complete stance is typically transient, and not a permanent accomplishment. Nevertheless, it might be possible to accomplish↗︎︎ it, meaning you always adopt it. (Or nearly always!)

Accomplishment might make you remarkably effective at resolving problems of meaningness—for yourself, and for others. You might seem capable of meaningness-wizardry, conjuring practical solutions with possibilities few would have noticed.

It may be worth aspiring to this!

On the other hand, it might make the stance seem out of reach, which could be discouraging. That could make commitment more difficult. Stabilizing the complete stance is a gradual process; wavering is inevitable. Expect progress over months and years, not days and weeks. (Sometimes sudden breakthroughs are possible, though!)

  • 1. I’ve borrowed this rhyme from informal teaching by Ngak’chang Rinpoche↗︎︎ on the relationship between two meditative states. Those are not parallel to confusion vs. completion, though, so the details aren’t relevant.
  • 2. We previewed this in “Stances are unstable” and “Exiting eternalism.”
  • 3. Here we are reviewing the “main method” described in “Meaningness as a liberating practice.” There’s a more detailed version↗︎︎ coming up!
  • 4. The complete stance is structurally parallel to to some interpretations of “enlightenment” in Buddhism that might be described as extraordinary states of awareness. It is not such a state, or any sort of state at all; and it is experientially unremarkable.
  • 5. The Further Reading Appendix mentions some systems that “rhyme” with the complete stance. However, they don’t squarely address or deliberately support it. Also, they’re all weird and difficult, and won’t be attractive or accessible for most people.
  • 6. And, in fact, the “rhyming systems” I mentioned in the footnote above—Dzogchen, existential phenomenology, ethnomethodology— are each notoriously nebulous, apparently due to their engagement with nebulosity.

Unity and diversity

Monism is the idea that “All is One.” Dualism is the idea that the world consists of clearly separate objects. These ideas may seem abstract, and irrelevant to your life. However, they are central to many religious, political, and philosophical systems. Therefore, it’s important to understand why both are wrong, how they are harmful, why they are attractive, and a better alternative.

Monism and dualism are, at root, ideas about boundaries, objects, and connections. Are all things One, without boundaries? Or many separated objects? Is everything totally connected? Or is every object a clearly distinct individual?

I will begin by answering “no!” to all those questions. Realizing that the everyday world doesn’t work in either a monist or a dualist way undercuts the intuitions that make these ideas seem reasonable.

Then I will look at first monism, and then dualism, in detail. Finally, I’ll describe participation, the complete stance↗︎︎ I recommend as a third alternative. The rest of this page summarizes these three stances↗︎︎.

Monism

The boundary that people care about most is the boundary between the self and the world. Denying↗︎︎ and fixating↗︎︎ that are the most significant applications of monism and dualism.

If All is One, then there is no boundary, and you are really↗︎︎ the entire universe. Typically, monists say that the universe is equivalent to God, so you are actually also God. As you realize everything is totally connected, you develop the ability to affect anything you want.

This is the ultimate fantasy of power and invulnerability. However, convincing yourself that you are All-powerful, when you aren’t, does not make your life go well.

When the fantasy collides with reality, monists retreat into a make-believe magical world. Monism produces dreamy spaciness, refusal to make any clear distinctions, refusal to judge. This leads to drifting through life, expecting other people to clean up your messes, contributing nothing except spiritual clichés mouthed at unwanted times.

As a social ideology, monism tends toward totalitarian denial of individuality.

Dualism

The nebulosity↗︎︎ of the self/other boundary means that we cannot even control our selves. What we call “self” constantly gets bits of “other” blended into it. That’s what perception does, what communication does, what interacting with the material world does.

The fantasy of dualism is that a clear separation between you and others frees you from their contaminating influence, and from responsibility to the world.

Dualism, by blinding you to connections, makes it easy to evade ethical responsibility for consequences. Psychologically, it produces alienation from the natural world, from other people, and from the sacred. As a social ideology, dualism tends toward denial of collective responsibility.

Participation

Participation is the stance that revels in the extraordinary variability of the world, that loves and engages with specifics and individuals; and also appreciates the porous self/other boundary, works skillfully with diverse connections, and accepts responsibility for whatever you encounter.

Schematic overview: unity and diversity

Stance↗︎︎MonismDualismParticipation
SummaryAll is OneI am clearly distinct from everything and everyone elseReality is indivisible but diverse
What it denies↗︎︎Differences, boundaries, specifics, individualityConnection, dynamic interplay, unbounded responsibility
What it fixates↗︎︎Unity; also over-emphasizes connectionBoundaries, separateness, limitations, definitions
The sales pitchYou are GodClarity gives you control
Emotional appealI am all-powerful, all-knowing, immortal, invulnerableI am not contaminated by other beings, and have only specific, limited responsibility for them
Pattern of thinkingWillful stupidityDistrustEngagement
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎, specialness↗︎︎Can combine with either eternalism or nihilism
AccomplishmentDirectly perceive all things as OnePerfect independenceSelf and other neither distinct nor identical
How it causes sufferingHave to blind self to diversity of physical realityAlienation due to being cut off from world and others
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObviousness of diversityObviousness of connectionDifficulty of understanding the philosophical view
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsAppreciation of diversityAppreciation of connectedness
Intelligent aspectI am not entirely separate from anythingThe world is endlessly diverse
Positive appropriation after resolutionProvisional understanding of indivisibilityPoints toward appreciation of diversity

Monism and dualism contain each other

Yin/Yang symbol
Pathological counter-dependency

Monism and dualism are opposites. But because each is obviously wrong, each turns into the other when cornered. A devious trick!

Monism↗︎︎ is the stance↗︎︎ that fixates↗︎︎ sameness and connections, and denies↗︎︎ differences and boundaries. Dualism↗︎︎ is just the other way around: it denies sameness and connections, and fixates differences and boundaries.

Both these confused↗︎︎ stances sometimes show themselves to be obviously wrong. The complete↗︎︎ stance of participation↗︎︎ recognizes that samenesses and differences, boundaries and connections, are all real, but also always somewhat nebulous↗︎︎: ambiguous and fluid. This is obviously accurate, but usually less convenient. Monism and dualism are simpler, and deliver particular emotional payoffs—some of the time.

The monism within dualism

All boundaries are somewhat vague. This is true of physical boundaries, and of abstract category boundaries. Sometimes you cannot say on which side of the boundary something falls—not for lack of knowledge, but because there is no right or wrong answer. This is intolerable for dualism.

Confronted with this nebulosity, dualism tries to harden the boundary by putting everything clearly on one side or the other. How? What defines a boundary? Everything inside the boundary is one way, and everything outside is the other way. Dualism exaggerates the commonality of everything inside, and the commonality of everything outside. It forces a choice onto items near the boundary, which must conform to one criterion or the other.

Dualism thereby imposes an impression of homogeneity. Everything inside is, ideally, exactly the same, and perfectly connected to everything else within. Everything outside is also exactly the same. So, on either side of the boundary, dualism turns into monism!

This dynamic is closely related to essentialism, which is a typical strategy for justifying the equivalence of the apparently dissimilar. “These two might look different,” essentialism says, “but they are essentially the same.” The “essence” is an invisible, magic, indwelling property that dualism claims explains the commonality, but that cannot be detected by any ordinary means.

Particularly harmful examples of monism-within-dualism are found in ideologies governing social groups. (Religions, political orientations, and ethnicities are typical examples.) The group presses its members all to be the same; to be our kind of person. Everyone outside is treated as interchangeably the wrong kind. The ideology has no room for anyone near the border. It does not accept that people on either side vary among themselves. The amount of pressure for conformity, and for rejection of outsiders, is a measure of how pathologically dualistic the group’s functioning is.

The dualism within monism

Confronted with patterns↗︎︎ of distinction, monism attempts to force universal homogeneity. Sameness is good; difference is bad. Pointing to unity is holy; pointing to distinctions is materialistic selfishness.

Everything and everyone is included within the One. The One is All. Anything that appears not to be included must be assimilated. Anything that cannot get fitted into the One is wrong and must be destroyed.

To see that everything is totally connected is enlightenment. To misunderstand things as separate is the root of all evil.

There must be no differences in value; everything and everyone is equal. Nothing is better than anything else. You must accept this. Claims of inequalities are discrimination; prejudice; intolerance. We must not allow intolerance; that is absolutely unacceptable. Intolerant people are ignorant and inferior.

In sum: when monism encounters a difference it cannot ignore, it turns into dualism—often a particularly absolutist and pathological dualism.

Some “spiritual” ideologies are the clearest examples of monism. They can be highly intolerant of anyone recognizing distinctions they deny, or rejecting imaginary connections they fixate. They may denounce non-believers as “scientistic materialists,” for example. As everyone knows, scientistic materialism is responsible for war, capitalist exploitation, the ecological rape of the planet, chemtrails, and vaccine-induced autism. None of those awful things would be allowed if everyone realized everything was connected.

Monist religions are exceptionally evangelical, pursuing an embrace, extend, extinguish↗︎︎ strategy. Perennialism is the claim that all religions are essentially the same. Specifically, they are essentially the same as monism. We should accept and include all religions, as different paths to the same Truth. Christianity, for example. Essentially, the message of Christianity is that you should emulate Jesus. Jesus is essentially God, who is essentially The One that is All. You emulate by realizing your essential sameness. So, really↗︎︎, the aim of Christianity is to discover that you are God, who is The Entire Universe.

This is a dire distortion of Christianity, which is a dualistic religion. None of Christianity—sin, salvation, the afterlife—makes any sense if you are “really” God. Nevertheless, many supposed Christians have converted to monism without noticing, and are unable to see any difference between the two. Monism, extolling tolerance, begins by saying that Christianity is totally true, but it eventually explains that old fashioned Christians are doing it wrong, because the “real” Christianity is actually monism. Christianity is only true insofar as it is monism.

Monism uses the same embrace-extend-extinguish strategy against Buddhism. Centuries ago, monist proponents of Hinduism “benevolently included” Buddhism as a “totally valid branch” of the greatly diverse tree of Hinduism. Then they insisted that everything about it was not quite right and must, step by step, be replaced with Hinduism. This was part of the reason Buddhism went extinct in India. In the past few decades, “spiritual but not religious” monism has infected modern Buddhism and mostly eaten it from within. It will be interesting to see how long Islam—perhaps the most dualistic of all religions—can withstand this virulent pathogen.

Egalitarian political ideologies also can fall into the intolerant monism that is dualistic in its approach to opponents. This is the pattern of “political correctness,” which says that everyone must be included, all beliefs must be accepted, and everyone is perfectly equal. Except for people who are not politically correct. They must be cast out. Their beliefs are unacceptable and must be silenced. They are ethically inferior; that’s their essential and permanent nature, and no amount of repentance and purification can redeem them.

The boundary between sameness and difference is nebulous yet patterned

Monism and dualism are mirror-image attempts to separate sameness and difference.

This is typical of confused stances, which come in pairs of apparent opposites. Each pair shares an underlying, unrecognized mistaken metaphysical assumption. The confused opposition can be resolved by making the assumption explicit, understanding why it is wrong, and replacing it.

The metaphysical assumption shared by monism and dualism is that boundaries must be perfectly solid, objective, eternal, clear, and definite. Monism recognizes, accurately, that there are no completely hard boundaries—but then wrongly denies that there are any differences at all. Dualism recognizes, accurately, that distinctions are important—but then wrongly fixates them.

All boundaries are somewhat nebulous; yet the patterning of the world implies that boundaries are everywhere.

There is never a perfectly definite fact-of-the-matter as to whether two things are the same or distinct. Any two things are somewhat different and somewhat similar; somewhat separated and somewhat connected. Understanding and acting on this is the complete stance, participation. It is “complete” in recognizing both sameness and difference, separation and connection.

I have used the yin/yang symbol, at the top of this page, to illustrate the pathological hard distinction between monism and dualism—the two colors in the figure. Each teardrop shape contains within it a distinct circle of the other color, which I am using to symbolize the inclusion of the opposite stance within each.

I know little about the Taoist philosophy in which the yin-yang symbol originated. I gather, though, that its metaphysics may approximate “participation.” In that case, the hard edges between black and white in the figure are misleading. As a symbol of participation, it would be more accurate if they shaded into each other. And not just gray between black and white. It would be more accurate, too, if the two halves of the diagram each showed contrasting but harmonious patterns of diverse colors.

Perhaps the ancient Chinese sages would like to commission me to redesign their sacred symbol? I haz mad graphic design skillz, and my rates can be quite reasonable on major jobs.

Further reading

The Guru Papers↗︎︎ presents an outstanding analysis of the pathologies of monism, its denial of differences, and its trick of turning into dualism when that fails. I have posted my notes on it here. The most relevant part starts with the note for page 303.

Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity↗︎︎ explores the pervasive nebulosity of all categories, and analyzes the pathologies of dualism and its fixation of boundaries. The book develops methods for working effectively with ambiguities of sameness and difference, avoiding both monism and dualism.

Both these books are particularly concerned with pathologies of monism and dualism in political and religious groups.

In “Inclusion, exclusion, unity and diversity↗︎︎” I wrote about a monist aspect of “Consensus Buddhism” (the white American Buddhist mainstream). The Consensus claims to include everyone, while deliberately excluding most Buddhists. This is a case of “dualism within monism” particularly close to home for me.

Boundaries, objects, and connections

Blueberry jam in jar: how many objects?

Monism↗︎︎ is the idea that “All is One”; dualism↗︎︎, that the world consists of clearly separate objects. To start, we need an understanding of what it means to be one thing, or a separate thing, in general. Then we can look at what it would mean for the entire universe to be one thing, or many separate things, and what might follow from that.

There is a jar of blueberry jam on my breakfast table. I could pick it up and toss it in the air and catch it. The lid is screwed on tight, so it will hold together. The jar won’t stick to the table or to my hand.

So, intuitively, an object is a bunch of bits that are connected together, and aren’t connected to other things. The boundary of the object is where the connections stop.

These definitions are often useful in practice. However, they also often don’t work.

Are a glass jam jar, its metal lid, and the jam itself one object, or three? It depends on what I’m doing with them. If I’m moving bottles around in the fridge, looking for the mustard, I’ll treat the jar with lid and contents as one object. That’s true even if I carelessly left the lid unscrewed and it could fall off. If you have a naked waffle and ask me to “pass the jam, please,” the jar and jam are the one object I’ll pass you—but I wouldn’t include the lid. If I’m polite, I might actually remove the lid before passing the jam.

And then there is the jam itself, as I stir it into my yogurt. It’s not object-like at all. It will stick to my hand, or to the table, if I spill a bit. It’s sticky blobby goo, with semi-squashed bits of blueberry. Are the blueberry bits separate objects or not? It’s impossible, if I poke at them, to say where their boundaries lie; they fade off indeterminately into the more liquid parts of the jam. Mixing it into the yogurt, the boundary between the two substances becomes gradually, increasingly obscure, indefinite, non-existent.

A cloud is a particularly dramatic example of ideas about objects not working. (That is one reason I use the word “nebulosity↗︎︎” so often; it means “cloud-like-ness.”) Seen from afar, you can say that this cloud and that one are definitely distinct. Yet as you get close, you find that a cloud has no boundary at all. And, there are no connections holding it together.

So, what is going on here? The world is not objectively divisible into separate objects. Boundaries are, roughly, perceptual illusions, created by our brains. Moreover, which boundaries we see depends on what we are doing—on our purposes.

However, boundaries are not just arbitrary human creations. The world is immensely diverse. Some bits of it stick together much more than other bits. Some bits connect with each other in many ways besides just stickiness. The world is, in other words, patterned↗︎︎ as well as nebulous.

Therefore, objects, boundaries, and connections are co-created by ourselves and the world in dynamic interaction.

Monism—“All is One”—is the denial↗︎︎ of boundaries. It recognizes, accurately, that there are no objective boundaries, but then insists that this means there are really↗︎︎ no boundaries at all. (Or, that boundaries are merely subjective, purely creations of the mind, which is almost as wrong.)

In the same way, monism tends to over-emphasize connections. “Everything is totally connected” is a typical false monist claim. Everything is connected—by gravity—but most things are not connected in any meaningful way. Monism sees connections that don’t exist, producing a magical world view. (Misunderstood “quantum physics” is a common justification.)

Dualism is the fixation↗︎︎ of boundaries. It insists they are perfectly well-defined and objective. It also tends to deny connections that actually do operate.

The next several sections of the book explain how boundaries, objects, and connections work in detail. Along the way, I’ll have more to say about nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎. Also, I’ll lay the groundwork for understanding participation↗︎︎, the stance↗︎︎ that resolves the mirror-image confusions of monism and dualism. Part of that is explaining “neither subjective nor objective, but interactive”—a theme that will be important throughout the book.

If what I said on this page was convincing, you could skip ahead, to the detailed discussions of monism, dualism, and participation.

However, the idea that the world is not made up of clearly separable objects, but is also not just one big blur, may be unfamiliar. Some readers may resist these claims; so I will explain in depth.

You may also find my explanation of how things are interesting just for its own sake.

Non-existence: Scarlet Leviathan

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The question of existence and non-existence is a colossal red herring.

Many metaphysicists, both in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and in the recent analytic tradition, have used sorites arguments to convince themselves that ordinary objects, such as pots and people, do not exist. This is a dire confusion.

Framing the problem as “whether and how objects exist” leaves the objects unchallenged and problematizes a property they may possess (viz. existence). But it is objectness that is problematic, not existence!

This page will review the history of the confusion. I'll cover particularly the Madhyamaka arguments of Nagarjuna, which were actually the starting point for Meaningness; and the analytic mereological tradition that begins with Peter Unger, who wrote a paper titled “I do not exist.”

Part of the problem is a common pattern in metaphysics, of mistaking physical intuitions as metaphysical intuitions. Another problem is a consistent failure to ask what “exists” even means—if anything. I will give a sketch of an answer to that.

Then I'll explain that the sorites arguments have nothing to do with existence; correctly understood, they problematize boundaries, and therefore the concept “object” instead.

Monism: the denial of difference

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

While this page is unwritten, see the chapter introduction for a better explanation. What follows is a very abstract summary of some key points.

Monism is the stance↗︎︎ that All is One. It denies separateness and diversity.

Monism is motivated by the unacceptability of specifics. Facts about one’s self, life, experience, and the world seem unattractive, and inessential. Monism holds that the essential is the abstract and general, instead—and those are seen as pure and all-good. The physical world, as it appears, is an impure illusion, which should be transcended.

Monism holds that all religions and philosophies are essentially the same, and that they point at the same ultimate truth. Namely, the truth of monism! This is a clever strategy for assimilating and extinguishing competing systems. To insist that “No, actually, our system contradicts yours” sounds aggressive and “not-nice”; but actually it is monism that has imperialistic aspirations.

Monism holds that the true self↗︎︎ is mystically identified with the One or Absolute or God or Cosmic Plan↗︎︎.

Critiques of monism

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Monism↗︎︎ can be criticized from the points of view of dualism↗︎︎, nihilism↗︎︎, or the complete stance↗︎︎.

The dualist and nihilist critiques of monism appear to have lost some of their effectiveness recently. The new monist pop spirituality has flown in the face of these critiques. It appears to have developed a new rhetorical technique for bypassing them.

I hope that a new critique, based in the complete stance, will be more effective.

The dualist critique of monism

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According to dualist↗︎︎ eternalism↗︎︎, monism↗︎︎ is wrong because it is not possible to achieve union with God.

If it were possible, the core logic of dualist eternalism—sin and salvation—would fail.

This critique is decreasingly effective, because more and more people reject the authority of the established (dualist) religions, and see no argument that unity with God is impossible, beyond “priests say so.”

For further reading, before I write this section: the Vatican has published, online, a very nicely done criticism of the New Age↗︎︎, much of which applies to monism more generally. (The New Age is pervasively monist.)

The nihilist critique of monism

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The nihilist↗︎︎ critique of monist↗︎︎ eternalism↗︎︎ is that it is factually false.

Although this critique is correct, it has recently become decreasingly effective. Widespread skepticism about the authority of science, and increasing acceptance of the view that “all beliefs are equally valid,” allow people to dismiss factual accuracy as irrelevant to spiritual truth.

The complete stance’s critique of monism

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From the point of view of the complete stance↗︎︎, monist↗︎︎ eternalism↗︎︎ fails on its own terms. It cannot deliver what it promises.

Dualism: the fixation of difference

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While this page is unwritten, see the chapter introduction for a better explanation. What follows is a very abstract summary of some key points.

Dualism is the stance↗︎︎ that individuals can be unambiguously identified and separated. It fixates↗︎︎ boundaries and denies↗︎︎ connections.

In the dualistic stance, the self exists separately from other people, from the world, and from any sort of eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ such as God. Fear of contamination by the nebulosity↗︎︎ of reality—always changing and ambiguous—motivates dualism.

Dualism comes in both eternalist↗︎︎ and nihilist↗︎︎ forms. Eternalist dualism is typical of traditional Western religions. It holds that the true self↗︎︎, or soul, is separate from God, or other eternal ordering principle. God is transcendent and separate from the world. (Eternalist monism, by contrast, asserts the ultimate identity of God, the world, and the soul.)

The scientific-materialist world view tends toward nihilist dualism (although it is possible to hold a scientific-materialist view without either nihilism or dualism). On this view, individuals exist separately, but have no real↗︎︎ meaning or purpose.

Participation

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page is unwritten. See the chapter introduction for some explanation. What follows is a very abstract summary of some key points.

Reality is indivisible but diverse. Boundaries and connections are both nebulous↗︎︎, but both real. They are neither objective nor subjective; neither inherent in the world, nor personal choices. They shift to serve practical functions, but cannot be merely imposed or arbitrary. They are accomplished through meaningful social activity of interpretation

Selfness

“Selfie”

(CC) Clauds Claudio

We are awash in ideological crazy-talk about “the self”:

  • Moralists say we have to overcome our selves because they are selfish

  • Psychotherapists say most people’s aren’t working well, and need tune-ups using their expert understanding of how selves should work

  • Spiritual teachers say we have somehow misplaced and forgotten our true selves, and must go on quests to find them

  • Most implausibly, Buddhists say the self does not exist—and, worse, many pop science writers agree!

Unfortunately, we cannot ignore these discordant voices, because questions of self are inseparable from questions of meaning: purpose, ethics, authority, and personal value.

Uneasily, we apply bits of all these stories about “self” in different circumstances. We might study one theory or many in detail, trying to make sense of our selves. Mostly, though, we try not to think to much about questions of self; it is anxiety-provoking, and experience shows it usually doesn’t lead anywhere useful.

Confused stances↗︎︎ rest on an unnoticed, mistaken metaphysical assumption: that “the self,” if any, must be a durable, separate, continuous, well-defined thing. Then these stances claim that there is such a thing (but maybe you have the wrong sort); or that there isn’t one (and you are stupid and doomed if you disagree); or that there ought to be one (so you need to create or find it); or that there ought not to be one (so you need to get rid of yours).

“Self” contrasts with “other”; between them, there must be a boundary. The last chapter explained how boundaries are always nebulous↗︎︎: vague, changeable, and purpose-dependent. This is especially true of the self/other boundary. Where we draw it varies according to what we are doing—and rightly so. The same applies to boundaries between different parts of the self (insofar as it is meaningful to speak of “parts of the self” at all).

We saw that there are two confused stances concerning boundaries: monism↗︎︎, which denies↗︎︎ boundaries, and dualism↗︎︎, which fixates↗︎︎ them. We’ve also discussed two other fundamental confused stances: eternalism↗︎︎ insists that everything is meaningful; nihilism↗︎︎ denies all meaning. These can combine, producing for example monist eternalism or dualist nihilism.

  • Dualist eternalism regarding the self/other boundary insists that you do have a self that is durable, separate, continuous, well-defined. Different versions assert conflicting claims about “what the self really↗︎︎ is.” Or, they say, you should have a particular kind of self, so if you don’t, you need to fix that.

  • Monist eternalism says that really↗︎︎ there is no boundary between self and other; so if it seems like there is, you need to fix that.

  • Nihilism says there is no self at all; the concept is meaningless, so if you think you have a self, you need to fix that.

These combine in extra-confused ways. Some people claim that your self really doesn’t exist, and it is bad, so you need to get rid of it. Some claim that you have a hidden True Self, and it is the same thing as having no self. Some claim this True Self is The Entire Universe.

All such confusions come from the assumption that “the self” must live in something like a house, with solid walls that stay put and keep hailstorms outside and your pet aardvarks inside. Crazy ideologies begin when insightful people notice the self/other relationship not working like that, but lack a framework for understanding nebulous boundaries.

Nebulous selfness

Recognizing that the “boundary” between self and other is both patterned↗︎︎ (non-arbitrary, partly predictable, somewhat reliable) and nebulous↗︎︎ (ill-defined, unstable, purpose-dependent) dissolves all the confused stances. I call this complete stance↗︎︎intermittently continuing.” Here, “self” is not a thing; it’s nebulous patterns of interaction. It is sometimes useful to say “selfness” or “selfing” to underline the non-object-ness.

Having abandoned the confused stances, there’s much to say about selfness in the complete stance. And this is all fascinating and often useful. But it’s important not to overvalue the details (so I will reluctantly limit my discussion). There’s more value simply in dissolving self as a problem. Once you firmly set aside the confusions, what remains doesn’t require a lot of fussing over.

For the complete stance, meaningness↗︎︎ lies in dynamics: patterns of interaction. To understand any particular dynamic, you have to look at aspects of both “self” and “other,” and also the “boundary” between them. (I’ve put scare quotes around all these to underline their nebulosity and non-object-ness.) Typically, most of “the self” and “the world” are irrelevant to a dynamic, so they are the wrong conceptual categories.

Aardvarks

Aadorable aardvarks (CC) Scotto Bear

Let me make a ridiculous analogy. You notice that your house is increasingly inhabited by tarantulas, which you fail to fully appreciate due to arachnophobia. You could declare them illusions and ignore them (no-self nihilism); that would work until you wake up with a pair engaged in amorous activities↗︎︎ on your face. You could tear down all the walls (monism) because you and tarantulas and aardvarks are All One. However, you’d still have tarantulas, plus hailstorms, and the aardvarks might bolt. You could caulk all the tiny holes around the windows to keep tarantulas out (dualism)—but we’ll see that won’t help unless you nail the front door shut too. (Then you’d starve.) You might decide that your house is the wrong kind (the kind that tarantulas infest) and move into a different one—but it turns out that won’t work either. There’s nothing wrong with your house (self).

On investigation, you discover that your daughter has been bringing home a tarantula every day to feed to the aardvarks; but they don’t like tarantulas, and ignore them, so the would-be meals wander off to inhabit your dress shoes and silverware drawer.

The problem is not with the house, nor with the world outside the house. The problem is an activity that actively transports creatures across the boundary. Discussion with your daughter reveals that her biology teacher has told her that aardvarks eat bugs, and the biggest bugs she could find were tarantulas, so she thought your pets would especially enjoy them. A misconception easily corrected; problem solved.1

Meaningness is like this, I will suggest. It is neither objective nor subjective: neither outside the self, nor inside. Rather, meanings are patterns of activity that cross the nebulous self/other boundary.

Nebulosity of self makes complete control impossible

“Intermittently continuing” is unsettling because it undercuts fantasies of control. It contradicts the ideal of a unitary subject with free will, because activity is always a dynamic, improvised collaboration with nebulous-but-patterned otherness.

(What I say here about control is condensed and may not make sense yet. I’ll explain more later in this chapter; the upcoming chapters on capability and contingency discuss nebulosity of control in depth.)

Any causal analysis of activity has to trace high-frequency loops of mutual influence that cross the self/other boundary. We cannot make independent choices because the permeability of that boundary—via perception and action—means we are never independent. It is futile to try to force interactions to conform to a preconceived idea of how they should go.

We cannot even control ourselves, because phenomena switch frequently from “self” to “other” and back; because “parts of self” have nebulous boundaries themselves; and because they are often more closely coupled to “other” than to other parts of self. As a dramatic example, when two people fall in love against their better judgement, each person’s emotions communicate more with the other’s than with their own more dispassionate thoughts.

Allowing nebulosity of selfness enables accurate relationships

Intermittently continuing means learning to be comfortable with the ambiguity and unpredictable changeability of selfness. That requires attention, courage, hard work, and good humor. However, it frees you from neurotic self-obsession, and increases the effectiveness and enjoyability of your relationships.

Supple, skillful selfing makes for satisfying, successful interactions. Firm and fluid othering enables us to play with the self/other boundary—whose interpenetrating nebulosity and pattern become a source of amusement. We can co-construct our lives as art projects in the shared space of meaningness, not inside or outside, but between and surrounding and pervading us.

  • 1. Did you know that the only thing aardvarks eat besides ants and termites are aardvark cucumbers↗︎︎, which fruit underground? For desert-living aardvarks, these cucumbers are a vital water source. Conversely, aardvark cucumbers are entirely dependent on aardvarks for reproduction. Nothing else eats them to disperse the seeds.

Schematic overview: self

Stance↗︎︎The authentic, true, deep selfSelflessnessIntermittently continuing
SummaryThe hidden, true self↗︎︎ is directly connected to the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, bypassing social constrictionsThere is, or should be, no self↗︎︎Selfness comes and goes; it varies over time and has no essential nature
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎ of selfPatterns↗︎︎ of self; the self/other boundary; natural self-interest
What it fixates↗︎︎The patterns↗︎︎ of selfness; the self/other boundaryDiscontinuity; absence of self/other boundary
The sales pitchYour true self↗︎︎ is much more exciting than your yucky regular oneYou can get rid of your yucky regular selfThe patterned↗︎︎ self is unproblematic once its nebulosity↗︎︎ is accepted
Emotional appealI’m much better than I thought I wasI have nothing to lose
Pattern of thinkingRomantic idolization of fantasy selfWillful blindness to continuity and self-interestHumorous affection for one’s foibles; absence of anxiety
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎, monism↗︎︎, specialness↗︎︎Nihilism↗︎︎, ordinariness↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, enjoyable usefulness
Accomplishment Authenticity in sense of living from true self↗︎︎ instead of regular selfEgolessnessConjuring supple, playful magic in the shared self/other space
How it causes sufferingAttempts to retrieve supposed true self↗︎︎ fail; attempts to live up to it failNeglecting practical personal affairs
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceNon-existence of true self↗︎︎Manifestations of regular selfFear of discontinuity; cannot repair or remove self
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsNo essential nature, no coherent true self↗︎︎I have much in common with who I was and will be
Intelligent aspectRecognizes negative social conditioning & possibility of spontaneityRecognizes lack of essential nature or durable continuity
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward power of nobility↗︎︎: we can be much more than we generally pretendPoints toward generosity of nobility↗︎︎

A billion tiny spooks

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This page will discuss the representational theory of mind↗︎︎. This disastrously mistaken theory is accepted by most cognitive scientists. Consequently, it has become highly influential in general Western culture, and is taken for granted by most educated Westerners. It has significantly distorted our understanding of our selves, and so of how to live.

The theory originates in the analytic philosophy of of mind. (“Originates” both historically and logically.) Post–1950 philosophy of mind has two aims:

  1. To develop a convincing argument for physicalism—the doctrine that mental things are actually physical things, or are “reducible” to physical things.
  2. To acknowledge and include cognitivism—the doctrine that people have beliefs, desires, and intentions (not merely dispositions and behaviors).

Physicalism is opposed mainly to mind-body dualism: belief in a non-physical soul. The natural human view (of pre-modern people) is that the mind is not a physical thing. It is the “ghost in the machine↗︎︎”: a “spook.” The dualist view is that spooks are the sort of thing that can think; can have beliefs, desires, and intentions. A person is a spook plus a meat robot. Meat can’t think.

So the “cognitive project” has been to explain how meat can think. That requires exorcising the spook—the ghost in the machine. The representational theory of mind is the dominant approach.

Simplifying somewhat, it says that beliefs, desires, and intentions are “represented” as sentences in a special language (“mentalese”). Mentalese, in turn, is “implemented” as physical things (structures, states, or processes) in the brain.

Beliefs, desires, and intentions are about things outside the brain. For example, the belief that “snow is white” is about snow.

The question is: what does “about” mean? And how can things in the brain be about things outside the brain? What sort of relationship is this “aboutness”?

No good answers to these questions have been found. Worse, there are good in-principle reasons to think that no answers can be found:

If beliefs, desires, and intentions were mental representations, then they would have to be non-physical. That is: spooky.

These are the “billion tiny spooks” of my title. The representational theory of mind beheads one big spook (the soul); but—like the Hydra—it simply returns as innumerable smaller ones.

(Bizarrely, mentalist philosophers often slip, and admit this in passing, describing representations as “non-physical”—despite their stated commitment to physicalism.)

The upshot is that either physicalism is wrong, or else the representational theory is wrong. Or both! I don’t have a strong opinion about physicalism; my guess↗︎︎ is that something like it is probably right, although it seems wrong as stated. Anyway, mind-body dualism is almost certainly wrong, so a non-spooky understanding of what it is to be human should be helpful.

The representational theory is also clearly wrong, for several reasons in addition to its logical contradictions. Overall, the problem is not that meat is the wrong thing to make beliefs, desires, and intentions from. It is that things inside the head cannot magically connect to things outside the head to be about them. (This discussion↗︎︎ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is relevant, but may be opaque if you’re not familiar with the literature.)

The representational theory is not only wrong; it is also harmful for ordinary people’s understanding of what we are and how to live. I’ll also explain these malign consequences.

Fortunately, there are alternative approaches to understanding what sort of things people are, which are more consistent with facts, and which lead to better ways to live. These approaches do not take the skull as a fixed boundary; their understandings span “inside” and “outside.” Their explanations involve interactional dynamics of physical causality that—through perception and action—constantly cross between “self” and “other.”

The true self

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Notions of “true” self are closely related to eternalism↗︎︎, because they fixate pattern↗︎︎ and deny the nebulosity↗︎︎ of the self.

There are both dualist↗︎︎ and monist↗︎︎ concepts of true self. The dualist true self is a “soul” or isolated subject. The monist true self is magically connected to, or identified with, the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.

Selflessness

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This will discuss several stances↗︎︎ that deny the self, in different ways. Some interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine of anatman are nihilist↗︎︎ in denying that the self exists at all. Some materialist views are also nihilistic denials. And then there are religious or ethical views of “selflessness” that hold that the self is existent but ought not to be, or ought to be ignored or undermined or subjugated or denied or generally kicked around.

Intermittently continuing

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An optimistic view of the self as incoherent, but not non-existent, and not necessarily problematic.

Neither objective nor subjective

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How can meaningness↗︎︎ be neither objective nor subjective? Doesn’t everything have to be one or the other? Either meanings are out there in the world, and properly objective, or inside you, and merely subjective or mental. Right?

As we've seen earlier in this chapter, the inside/outside, self/other distinction is nebulous↗︎︎, and often irrelevant, because meaning keeps crossing it. Meaningness couldn't be either subjective or objective, because it extends freely between, across, and around self and other.

Not objective

It's been obvious for more than a century that the universe is not inherently meaningful (eternalism↗︎︎). However, it's also not inherently meaningless (nihilism↗︎︎). It's neither inherently meaningful nor inherently meaningless because meaning is not the sort of thing that can be inherent.

Meaningness is an interactional dynamic that arises between oneself and one's situation. The problem comes when we deny our part in that, and try to put all the responsibility for meaningfulness out in the situation. We want to do that because we don't trust ourselves. We don't think the meanings we co-create will be good enough. We want a solid, definite, separate, permanent, inherently existing meaning to be made available. (This is what people invent God for—to feed us that kind of meaning.) That kind of meaning would be reassuring and dependable.

However, there isn't any meaning like that. The only kind that exists is nebulous↗︎︎: ambiguous, fluctuating, uncertain; like a dance, not like a statue. That might seem unsatisfactory at first. However, once you accept that meaning is like that, you can see that it's actually much better than the hypothetical solid kind of meaning. It provides freedom and creativity and exploration and lightness, where the given-by-God kind of meaning would be restrictive, dull, heavy, boring, and inescapable. If the universe had inherent meaning we would all be living in a totalitarian prison.

Not subjective

If meaningness were merely subjective, or if it were a matter of individual or social choice, it would not be possible to be mistaken about it. Yet we make mistakes about meaningness all the time.

This was the point of my casino story. I was mistaken not about what happened, factually, but about what it meant. You can't say that “the universe loves me" was "true for me". It was just plain false.

Meaningness in the complete stance

Meaning is a collaborative, improvised accomplishment. We re-make meaning in every moment, through concrete, situated meaning-making work.

Even the most simple, mundane meanings (like the meaning of breakfast) are interactional—they involve you, your yogurt and jam, the spoon and table, the people you are eating breakfast with, and (to decreasing extents) everyone involved in creating that situation, and all the non-human actors who were also involved. The more of that stuff you remove, the less meaning is there.

Purpose

This page is outdated. The text below is from the first, 2007 draft of Meaningness. My understanding of the material has changed since then, and the style I write in too. Someday I would like to rewrite this; but I hope the 2007 version may be adequate for now.

This chapter discusses stances↗︎︎ toward purpose.

For an introduction to this topic, see “An appetizer: purpose.”

The question of purpose is easy for both eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎. For a committed eternalist, your purpose is whatever the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ says it is; no problem. For a committed nihilist, there can be no purpose; no problem. Both stances are difficult to live up to. In practice, we usually fall into two other, confused stances: mission and materialism.

These confused stances↗︎︎ share an underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption: that purposes can be classified as “mundane” or “higher,” and only one of those sorts is meaningful.

  • Mundane purposes are those we share with other social mammals: food, security, reproduction, and position in social dominance hierarchies. They also include material altruism on behalf of one’s family or tribe.
  • Higher purposes are those that transcend animal existence, such as creative production, disinterested altruism, and religious salvation. These are sometimes called “transcendent,” “eternal,” or “ultimate.” Their value should survive your physical death, or have significance in realms beyond the material.

Materialism is the stance that only mundane purposes count; it fixates↗︎︎ their value, and denies↗︎︎ higher purposes. We have no choice but to pursue sex, power, status, safety, pleasure and possessions; anything else is a delusion. Mission is its mirror image: it fixates higher purposes and denies mundane ones. We have a specific higher purpose, and pursuing others is wrong.

Death is a common problem of meaningness. One reason is that “you can’t take it with you.” Whatever mundane purposes we have satisfied in life are immediately and totally obviated by death. All our possessions, everything we have accumulated, the structures we have built to keep us safe and comfortable, the people who love us, our honors and accomplishments, our position in society—all are instantly torn away and we return to zero. Soon we are forgotten. Perhaps children remember us; but in a hundred years, no one will know or care in the least how much we had or whether we got what we wanted or not. How can something matter when no one still living even knows about it? In the big picture, it seems all the concerns that take up almost all the energy of almost everyone’s lives are completely meaningless.

There are two common responses to this. One is to observe that, since everything is a zero after we are dead, it is all the more urgent to get on with life now. Purportedly transcendent accomplishments are of zero value to me after I am gone. Better to get what I can while I can. That is materialism. The second possible response is to observe that, since all mundane purposes are nullified by death, there is no point whatsoever in pursuing them. Rather, all effort should be devoted to an eternal, higher purpose, whose accomplishment can survive my death. This is the stance of mission.

Mission often additionally claims that each person has a unique higher purpose; so it is mutually supportive with the stance of specialness↗︎︎. Materialism is concerned with purposes everyone shares; so it mutually supportive with ordinariness↗︎︎.

Both mission and materialism can be seen as muddled middles↗︎︎ that try, and fail, to reconcile eternalism and nihilism. Both hold that certain purposes are definitely meaningful (like eternalism) and others are definitely not (as in nihilism).

Animal desires are the most emotionally obvious, and so materialism is more closely allied to nihilism, admitting the meaningfulness only of the material domain. It is easier to deny the meaning of higher purposes, because their objects are not immediately apparent. On the other hand, the meaninglessness of many mundane events is obvious. You missed the your usual bus to work because it left two minutes early; the Coke machine mistakenly gave you an extra coin in change; you spilled some of it on your shirt. So what? It’s hard to believe the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ cares about such things.

Mission is more closely allied with eternalism, admitting the nebulosity of only the material domain. It is easier to deny the nebulosity of the transcendent, because many higher purposes are too abstract to definitively refute.

As attempts at reconciliation of eternalism and nihilism, based on recognition of the errors of both, materialism and mission both also partake of the nature of the complete stance↗︎︎. However, they both are ultimately failures, and so in practice we oscillate between the two.

Alternatively, since both are unworkable, a muddled middle↗︎︎ tries to find a further halfway point between them. It mingles materialism with mission, attempting to satisfy the demands of both in a single course of action. You might, for instance, pursue fame and glory leading a celebrity media campaign to save starving Africans from poverty. Motivations are usually mixed. When pursuing higher purposes, one almost always also hopes for some mundane reward.

The complete stance↗︎︎ for purpose, enjoyable usefulness, rejects the mundane/eternal dichotomy. The value of both sorts of purposes is nebulous↗︎︎ but patterned↗︎︎. This complete stance replaces the misleading question “what am I supposed to do” with “what can I do now to be useful and enjoy myself?”

Schematic overview: purpose

Stance↗︎︎MissionMaterialismEnjoyable usefulness
SummaryOnly higher↗︎︎ purposes are meaningfulOnly mundane purposes↗︎︎ are meaningfulAll purposes are meaningful, when they are. Do things that are useful and enjoyable.
What it denies↗︎︎Value of mundane purposes↗︎︎Value of higher purposes↗︎︎
What it fixates↗︎︎Value of higher purposes↗︎︎Value of mundane purposes↗︎︎
The sales pitchFind and follow your true mission↗︎︎, and the universe resonates with youHe who dies with the most toys, winsThere is no scoreboard
Emotional appealExciting, personal, transcendent purpose lifts you out of mundanityGet what you want
Pattern of thinkingFantasy; non-ordinary methods for seeking the supposed true missionGrim self-interestFlow
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎; specialness↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎Nihilism↗︎︎; ordinariness↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, intermittently continuing
AccomplishmentSacrifice all mundane purposes↗︎︎ to eternal mission↗︎︎ (saintliness)Exclusive self-interestRenaissance person
How it causes sufferingCan never find your supposed true mission↗︎︎; neglect mundane aspects of lifeCan never get enough; alienation from others and from authentic creativity
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceReasonable self-interestCompassion, creativity Is that it? No hope of completing purpose, so no hope for salvation or basis for self-congratulation
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsMundane purposes↗︎︎ matter to meI do care about others, and about creative work
Intelligent aspectHigher purposes↗︎︎ are valid; materialism↗︎︎ is unsatisfyingMundane purposes↗︎︎ are valid; mission↗︎︎ is a fantasy
Positive appropriation after resolutionCreativity and generosity are aspects of enjoyable usefulnessMaterial satisfaction and accomplishment are aspects of enjoyable usefulness

Mission

This page is outdated. The text below is from the first, 2007 draft of Meaningness. My understanding of the material has changed since then, and the style I write in too. Someday I would like to rewrite this; but I hope the 2007 version may be adequate for now.

Mission is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that only “higher↗︎︎” purposes are meaningful.

As an attempt to reconcile↗︎︎ eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎—with an emphasis on eternalism—mission tries to overcome the obstacles to eternalism and the defects of nihilism. The obstacles to eternalism are the obviousness of nebulosity and meaningness, and the necessity of submitting one’s self to the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎. Mission admits nebulosity in the mundane domain, thereby partially evading eternalist demands. And, we’ll see soon, it also tries to preserve one’s personal self-definition in the eternal domain, by obfuscating and owning higher purposes. Meanwhile, mission attempts to evade nihilism’s accurate perception of the nebulosity↗︎︎ of the self by reinforcing it with a fixed↗︎︎ higher purpose.

Eternalism holds that all things are meaningful, which includes the mundane. However, while this is not logically necessary, eternalist religions typically give negative value to “the world” and the domain of animal meaning.1 Consequently, mundane behavior is tightly regulated. The stance of mission allows you to withdraw this part of your life from the purview of the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. In the stance of mission, mundane concerns are seen not to matter, so that one has the freedom to behave any old way. As a consequence, the material lives of those committed↗︎︎ to mission tend to be nasty messes, marked by financial irresponsibility, distorted and neurotic relationships, and neglect of their personal physical environment. One can justify this on the grounds that mundane concerns are trivial, and that it is actually noble to neglect them, sacrificing them to the mission.

For eternalism, higher purposes are fixed and universal. The eternal ordering principle gives everyone has the same purpose, or at most there are a small number of prescribed roles (such as priest, layman, housewife). If you subscribe to an eternalist religion, any priest can tell you exactly what you ought to do, and he will have the same answer for everyone in your role. As a consequence, the eternalist has certainty. If you act in accordance with the eternal principle, you have divine justification for your action, and a guarantee of your righteousness. For many people this is profoundly comforting. It frees one from freedom, and the uncomfortable responsibility of choice that comes with freedom.

But doing the same thing everyone else is supposed to do is dreary. Mission is attractive when we want the comfort of eternalism but find that it is too restrictive. We want more freedom to do our own thing. Even when we aren’t sure what our higher purpose is, we are pretty darn sure it isn’t what the priest says. It is most often those who are not committed members of an organized religion who commit↗︎︎ instead to mission as a stance. They are “spiritual but not religious” or “seekers” or New Agers or “have their own path,” or try to combine the uncombinable (“I’m a Neo-Pagan Christian”; “I’m a Buddhist and an observant Jew”; “I’m really into Taoism and Native American shamanism”). Generally one comes to this kind of vague and conflicted spirituality because the demands of authentic religions are too strenuous, but one is unwilling to abandon religion for materialism.

I have defined mission as fixing higher purposes while denying mundane meaningfulness. In practice, proponents of mission usually go a step beyond this definition. They hold that you have a single, unique, personal higher purpose: your mission. Moreover, only you can discover what your personal mission is, although it is a gift to you from God.2 This puts your mission beyond the control of priests and dogma, which gives you a measure of private living space in the realm of higher purpose, but at the same time preserves your divine warrant.

Whereas purposes according to eternalism are typically common knowledge, mission is initially mysterious. Not only does my unique personal mission have to be discovered by me personally, this can be done only using non-ordinary methods. The ordinary, or “rational,” approach to choosing purposes beyond the mundane might be based on assessing my talents, skills, and circumstances, and comparing how well these might serve available higher ends, such as various arts, forms of socially beneficial work, or religious activities. Mission dismisses this approach as nasty materialism. (As a variant of nihilism, materialism does tend to be nasty—and intelligent. As a variant of eternalism, mission tends to be “nice”—and credulous.)

To find my mission, I must, rather, use quasi-magical methods, such as prayer, divination, vision questing, talk therapy, dream work, or meditation. There are whole industries who can help you with this: career counselors, hallucinogenic shamans, fundamentalist ministers, management coaches, aromatherapists, past-life regression rebirthers, and Jungians—among many others. From a nasty materialist point of view, all these approaches boil down to grubbing about in my psychology to create some vague but attractive fantasy of what I might do. Collectively, I will call these psycho-magic.

Mission’s theory of suffering can be stated as a distorted form of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths:

  1. The materialist way of life is full of suffering.
  2. Suffering is caused by failure to align one’s actions with one’s true mission.
  3. Suffering can be ended by aligning one’s actions with one’s mission.
  4. The way to align one’s actions with one’s mission is to apply psycho-magic.

Deep down in our hearts, we all know that we have a mission. We know that there must be more to life than the mundane rat race; so we must have a true calling, a reason we were put here on earth. When we find it and embrace it, everything falls into place and we discover profound inner peace. Acting on our mission gives life an extraordinary appeal, the wonderful feeling that we are in synch with reality and fulfilling the promise of something transcendent. Mission is more than a job description or social role; it is a matter of the soul. Only the life-force-denying insistence of society that we pay allegiance to a spurious realism, and the siren song of petty materialism, keeps us from following our hearts and joyfully doing that which we were truly meant to. Resisting our deep purpose causes only pain, struggle, and heartache.

Materialism’s quantitative theory of suffering gives rise to competition, success and failure. If you think you will eventually get enough, it’s hard to break out of materialism. Mission’s qualitative theory is particularly attractive to people who believe they can’t successfully compete. It can be a kind of consolation prize. No one else has my unique mission, so there’s no possibility of comparing accomplishments. The expectation that one’s mission be unique explains why it is hard to find.

Uniqueness can also make me feel special. Mission and specialness↗︎︎ are allied; we’ll discuss this in depth in the chapter on that stance.

Since my single inherent mission is supposed to guide me throughout my life, it is necessarily abstract and open-ended. It cannot actually either be accomplished, nor can I definitely fail to accomplish it. I can only act in accordance with it, or not. This avoids the problem real higher purposes can share with mundane ones: that both success and failure are disappointing.

Because my mission is inherent in me from birth, no one can take it away. Talent fades, or can become obsolete, or is surpassed by the next generation. It is nebulous. My unique mission, however, cannot be challenged by reality: it is eternal and absolute.

The confused “true self” stance is therefore also closely allied with mission: my unique, true purpose is the essence of my authentic being—or close to it.

  • 1. Some predominantly eternalist religions may deny the meaningfulness of the mundane altogether—in which case they have adopted the stance of mission rather than being fully eternalistic. Nietzsche wrote [need cite] that Christianity is nihilistic in removing meaning from this earthly life, to instead focus on a supposed afterlife. To the extent that this is true (which seems to vary among Christian sects), Christianity is not altogether eternalistic.
  • 2. Some advocates for mission say that your mission was something that you and God collaborated in constructing before you were born. You mostly forgot it during the birth process; some children remember it better than many adults.

Mission: defects and obstacles

This page is outdated. The text below is from the first, 2007 draft of Meaningness. My understanding of the material has changed since then, and the style I write in too. Someday I would like to rewrite this; but I hope the 2007 version may be adequate for now.

The two aspects of mission↗︎︎—the fixation↗︎︎ of higher purposes↗︎︎ and denial↗︎︎ of mundane purposes↗︎︎—both cause unnecessary suffering.

Fixating a higher purpose causes suffering in the search for it, suffering if the one you “discover” is bogus, suffering as you overlook other opportunities, and suffering as its suitability wanes. Denying mundane purposes leads to unrealistic actions, neglect, ineffectuality, failure, and consequent pain for oneself and others.

When events make these defects obvious, they become obstacles↗︎︎ to maintaining↗︎︎ the stance↗︎︎—however committed↗︎︎ to it you may be. Like all confused↗︎︎ stances, mission is inherently unstable. It typically alternates with mission↗︎︎ in our lives.

Finding your mission is, apparently, difficult. Some people devote enormous amounts of time and energy in searching for it. This can last years, or for a lifetime. At times, you believe that you have gotten “signs,” or have had flashes of profound insight, and perhaps have even finally discovered your true mission. Then you are excited, and you pursue that mission. But in a few months, you don’t seem to have made much progress, and “God wouldn’t have given me a purpose if he didn’t mean me to make progress, would he?” Maybe you misidentified the purpose.

Or maybe you’re just not up to the task. Or maybe you’re being weak and dithering when you should be pursuing your mission. Perhaps you should whip yourselve into pursuing it harder. So you do that for a while, but then suddenly find you can’t remember what your mission was after all. Maybe you weren’t meant to follow this path after all? You look back in your diary to see what you wrote down when you had the revelation, and it seems to fall flat. Why did you think that was your mission? Why doesn’t the Cosmos give you another sign? Oh, misery. It must be time to do some intensive psycho-magical work again.

Mission is a scam. It is inherently selfish: it is about “the perfect rôle for me,” not about “things that need doing.”

Authentic eternalism↗︎︎ frees you from the responsibility of choice. Mission wants freedom from eternalism’s imposition of higher purposes, but simultaneously to preserve certainty by avoiding choice. The myth that you can discover your mission rather than choosing it (existentialism↗︎︎) or accepting it (eternalism) is a sleazy attempt to have it both ways. It allows you to pretend to be in accord with the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎, but it’s really all about self-righteousness and self-justification while doing as you please.

Fortunately, it doesn’t work.

The reason you can’t finally find your mission is that there is no such thing. That is not to say that higher purposes are not meaningful, but that they are nebulous↗︎︎. Accordingly, there is no higher purpose that is inherently and permanently the single one you should pursue. If you search for that, confusion and disappointment are certain. Then you are liable to fall into nihilism↗︎︎, concluding that there is no purpose to life after all, and perhaps become suicidally depressed. Or you may fritter away years doing things you know to be meaningless, paralyzed and anxious, waiting and hoping that your mission will finally reveal itself. At best, you may jump back to materialism when mission shows no progress. At least, with materialism, there clear cause-and-effect involved, no unreliable psycho-magic is required, and you can tell if you are getting somewhere. Besides, you’ve got to eat.

Imagining that you have found a mission can quite as bad.

If a supposed “mission” is sufficiently concrete, it becomes a practical project at which we can succeed or fail. Then if you complete your mission successfully, what else is there to live for? If you fail at it conclusively, what else is there to live for? You supposedly had only one mission; you’re all used up.

If the supposed mission is not sufficiently concrete, it is no guide to action. People often come up with “personal mission statements” like “I will always live in complete integrity for the benefit of others.” An attractive sentiment, that, but useless.

The “non-ordinary methods” used to find “authentic missions” examine your psychology: both what you “truly” want to do (“in your heart”), and on what your resources are (talents, personality traits, and so forth). But the problem with psychology is that the self is nebulous: insubstantial, ambiguous, changing.

If you follow your psychology, your idea of what your mission is may change every few months—or even moment to moment. But a mission is supposed to be the guiding principle of your entire life. Frequently changing your ideas about your mission avoids both failure and success. Avoiding failure preserves the comforting illusion that you will eventually find your mission for real, and then everything will come out right. But avoiding success means that you drift or bounce from one project to the next without ever accomplishing anything of significance. You are led like a pig with a ring in the nose by the rope of your ever-changing psychology.

The idea that you have one definite mission that you can definitely discover can lead you to seize on something quite wrong and pursue it with far greater determination than it deserves. I once acted as a business consultant to Fifi, who had decided that her mission in life was to create the world’s first mobile beauty spa. She was going to outfit a large motor home as a combined live/work space. She would park it in downtown financial district parking lots, sleep in the back, and offer services out of the front. Fifi’s own expertise was in color consulting (advising people on what color clothes to wear). She recognized that this business didn’t require the use of the motor home; she could, and did, color-consult in her clients’ own homes or offices. So she would hire make-up artists and masseuses to create the actual business. She presented this as a glorious vision of selfless service to unmet needs of busy female executives.

During the development of a detailed business plan, it became at each step more obvious that this project was stupid. The world does not need a mobile beauty salon—and neither did Fifi. Mobility produced no significant convenience benefit to potential customers; it was not a cost-effective way of providing the services; there were government regulatory problems with using parking lots as a place of business; a motor home large enough to both live and work in was unreasonably expensive. But she was convinced that this was her true life’s purpose. Fifi herself was not stupid, but she was using the myth of mission to avoid having to genuinely look at her situation. In fact, her “vision” was an incoherent fantasy based on a mishmash of unrealistic solutions to problems in her personal life: conflicts and disappointments in her housing and work situations.

Even if the mission you fixate on is initially sensible, over time it can diverge increasingly from the reality of what you can do, what you want to do, and what is useful, due to the nebulosity (ambiguity and mutability) of both yourself and your circumstances. If your life’s mission is “to elevate the world’s consciousness through song,” and you develop nodules on your vocal cords that make singing impossible, then what would be a serious practical set-back for a materialist↗︎︎ becomes an existential catastrophe. If your life-mission is “to bring the benefits of natural herbal remedies to everyone who is ailing,” then you have a more serious problem than a career change if herbal supplements go out of fashion or are banned by the government.

Paul Graham’s insightful essay “How to Do What You Love↗︎︎” has this advice:

Don’t decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it’s wrong.

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell “Don’t do it!”… How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid. [That is, her former self.]

Identifying a single mission can be helpful in bringing focus to a difficult long-term project. But it also means you may overlook other opportunities that could be pursued in parallel. The careers of highly-productive and highly-creative people are usually marked by opportunism, in a positive sense: they change directions repeatedly when their interests and circumstances change. That keeps them from getting stale, and makes the best use of their abilities and alternatives. That is the way to dance with nebulosity and pattern.

What should I do with my life?

This page is outdated. The text below is from the first, 2007 draft of Meaningness. My understanding of the material has changed since then, and the style I write in too. Someday I would like to rewrite this; but I hope the 2007 version may be adequate for now.

A good question… Or is it?

If you look for answers—in books, on the web, from supposed experts—everyone will agree:

Discover your unique talent, follow your passion, and success is guaranteed.

Richard Bolles’ enormously successful self-help book What Color Is Your Parachute↗︎︎ was a main reason this idea came to dominate our culture’s thinking about personal purpose in the realm of work.

It was originally published in 1970, just around the time that the formerly-industrial American economy started creating large numbers of jobs manipulating abstract meanings rather than bits of metal. This caused a crisis of meaning. The fraction of the population for whom a career was supposed to be a source of meaningfulness jumped. But which were truly meaningful? Most of those meaning-manipulating jobs are obviously bullshit↗︎︎.

Bolles’ idea was hugely appealing: I am special↗︎︎, I have a unique mission↗︎︎, and if I pursue that mission as a career, the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ will certainly reward me for being true to myself.

It’s terrible advice, though. It’s done great harm, to individuals and to society.

Pragmatically, it’s bad career advice. If there’s something unusual about you, it’s generally pretty unlikely anyone wants to pay you for it. (Of course, there are exceptions, and advocates of this idea tell inspiring stories about nice people who became extraordinarily successful because they had an obsession with garden snails or something.) If you love doing something, probably a lot of other people do, too, so there’s likely to be an oversupply of people who want that sort of work, and it won’t pay well. Or at all!

Discovering this often sets you off on a Quest for your True Mission In Life; if only you could find that, a satisfying career would follow! This reliably causes misery, as in the story of Fifi’s bad career vision.

At the level of meaningness↗︎︎, it’s also terrible advice. The stance of mission↗︎︎ reliably messes up your life and makes you miserable.

You don’t have a single, special purpose or passion in life. You have many, and they’re all shared with others. Which ones are best to pursue depends on pragmatic considerations, including “how much can I get paid for this?” Such circumstances shift over time. In 1970, everyone assumed they’d only have one career. It’s common now to change every decade or so.

Which purposes are best to pursue also depends on shifting interests, increasing capabilities, and the arc of personal development↗︎︎ through adulthood.

There is no “supposed to” about purposes. Implicit in “supposed to” is that Someone else is doing the supposing. Bolles was an Episcopal clergyman. His book was notionally secular, but God is a constant ghostly presence. If you don’t think God is going to give you career advice, you should be suspicious and careful when reading this book, or the enormous number of similar texts it inspired.

If you do think God should be involved in your career, I’d suggest adopting↗︎︎ the eternalist↗︎︎ stance rather than mission↗︎︎. In other words, take your religion much more seriously. It probably does not recommend the sorts of self-centered attitudes and psycho-magical exercises Bolles did.1

Encouraging young people to “follow their passion” and “discover their mission” has created an enormous oversupply of graduates with expensive degrees in fields that are almost entirely useless. This is bad for progress, for making the world better by doing pragmatically useful things. It has also created a class of meaning-manipulating malcontents who agitate for social changes that provide bullshit jobs↗︎︎ for them. They have become a substantial, and often harmful, political force.

“What should I do with my life?” is a bad question. “Pursuing which purposes will be most enjoyable and useful now and over the next several years?” is a better one.

2020 note

I wrote that “everyone will agree” (about what you should do with your life) in 2007. It was true then. I began working out a rebuttal. The above is a rough draft, partly from then, partly from 2020.

Recently, Cal Newport has written about this extensively. I haven’t yet read his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love↗︎︎. However, from summaries↗︎︎, his critique seems to be broadly similar to what I intended:

The passion hypothesis, which says that the key to loving your work is to match a job to a pre-existing passion, is bad advice. There’s little evidence that most people have pre-existing passions waiting to be discovered, and believing that there’s a magical right job lurking out there can often lead to chronic unhappiness and confusion when the reality of the working world fails to match this dream.

We don’t have much evidence that matching your job to a pre-existing interest makes you more likely to find that work satisfying. The properties we know lead people to enjoy their work—such as autonomy, mastery, and relationships—have little to do with whether or not the work matches an established inclination.

His alternative advice seems at least partly right:

It’s important to adopt the craftsman mindset, where you focus relentlessly on what value you’re offering the world. This stands in stark contrast to the much more common passion mindset, which has you focus only on what value the world is offering you.

I’m not totally on board with “relentlessly,” or with the implication here that you only focus on what value you are offering the world, rather than what value the world offers you. The complete stance↗︎︎ for purpose acknowledges the role of both.

The last part of his book also explicitly advocates “career mission.” Having not read it, I’m not sure how his use of “mission” relates to mine here.

  • 1. “At the heart of this book is the Flower Exercise: a self-inventory in which you examine seven ways of thinking about yourself” says the 2020 edition.

Politics make for mediocre missions

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

“Politics” has largely replaced religion as a source of meaning in Western countries.

In the dimension of purpose, this manifests as making some political agenda into a personal mission↗︎︎.

That causes all the usual personal problems taking on a mission does in general. Additionally, it messes up politics itself, and contributes to our current crisis of institutions.

Political activism can be valuable if it is realistic, meaning if you are competent at it and if you are promoting policies that are likely to work. Taking it as a personal mission usually results in overlooking those “ifs” in favor of narcissistic emotional needs.

There is no cosmic scoreboard. Do you have something specific to contribute, or are you just showing off how on-the-right-side you are?

Antidotes to fixating higher purposes

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will cover a variety of antidotes to one of mission↗︎︎’s two metaphysical errors: fixating↗︎︎ higher purposes↗︎︎.

Recognizing that mission is essentially selfish and aggressive (while pretending to be altruistic). It’s me trying to force the world to do what I am pretending God told me I’m supposed to make it do.

Your purpose? You think some eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ of the universe cares enough to give you your very own purpose? Exactly one of them? And you are different enough from everyone else that you get your own private one?” Well, no, when you put it that bluntly…

Refuting the fear that if I don’t have a mission, then the universe is meaningless, and that is horrible, and I would be miserable.

Antidotes to denying mundane purposes

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will cover a variety of antidotes to one of missions↗︎︎’s two metaphysical errors: denying↗︎︎ mundane purposes↗︎︎.

Recognizing the unattractive self-righteousness of denial of mundane desires.

Impracticality of mission orientation. Need realism.

Common pattern in people addicted to mission of neglecting their mundane circumstances, thereby creating messes for themselves that they expect other people to clean up because they are too elevated to deal with them.

Courage needed to tackle mundane domains after neglect, because so deeply dug into hole.

Obstacle: viewing as crass. This is kitsch. Too good to get your hands dirty.

Pattern of initially applying eternalistic approaches when confronting neglected mundane mess. E.g. practicing affirmations (“I am growing more and more fruitful each day”) rather than taking mundane practical action (figuring out which credit card has the highest interest rate and paying it off first, or rolling the balance over to a card with a lower rate). “Money will come to me when the time is right.” “God will bless me materially as he sees fit.”

Materialism

This page is outdated. The text below is from the first, 2007 draft of Meaningness. My understanding of the material has changed since then, and the style I write in too. Someday I would like to rewrite this; but I hope the 2007 version may be adequate for now.

Materialism is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that only “mundane,” self-interested purposes are meaningful.

As an attempt to reconcile eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎—with an emphasis on nihilism—materialism tries to overcome the obstacles to nihilism and the defects of eternalism.

  • The central obstacle to nihilism is the obviousness of meaning; especially the meanings of one’s desires and the objects of one’s desires. Consequently, materialism is all about self-gratification and self-preservation.
  • The central defect of eternalism is its demand that you serve the “eternal,” “higher,” or “transcendent” purposes of the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. Those are often unreasonable, inconvenient, painful, or outright harmful. Materialism rejects eternalism’s demand by denying↗︎︎ the meaningfulness of all purposes other than the mundane ones. Those, which we share with other social mammals, are too obvious to deny.

Materialism is most obviously about the accumulation and consumption of physical objects, and the term is sometimes used to refer exclusively to that. But in a broader sense it covers dedication to the pursuit of any self-interested purpose. These include, for instance popularity, fame, sex, status, and power.

Materialism doesn’t work, but we often adopt↗︎︎ it because it seems like common sense. The sense is that getting what you want is what makes you happy; not getting what you want, or getting what you don’t want, makes you unhappy. If you could get enough of what you want, then you’d be much happier.

And, this is mostly not wrong! Mundane purposes are real purposes, and are often entirely worth pursuing. The complete stance↗︎︎ toward purpose—“enjoyable usefulness” recognizes this.

There are two problems. First, getting what you want often doesn’t make you happy. Second, ignoring unselfish, eternal purposes can make your life pretty meaningless, which is a bad thing in itself, and also usually makes you unhappy when you notice and admit it.

Rejecting materialism

This page is outdated. The text below is from the first, 2007 draft of Meaningness. My understanding of the material has changed since then, and the style I write in too. Someday I would like to rewrite this; but I hope the 2007 version may be adequate for now.

Materialism↗︎︎ wrongly fixates↗︎︎ mundane purposes↗︎︎, and denies↗︎︎ higher↗︎︎ ones. Both aspects cause unnecessary trouble.

This page explains how three other confused stances↗︎︎, eternalism↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎, and nihilism↗︎︎ reject↗︎︎ materialism. These rejections are each partly right, and obviously so. Unless you are stubbornly committed↗︎︎ to materialism, you will admit this, if perhaps sometimes reluctantly. That makes these considerations obstacles↗︎︎ to maintaining↗︎︎ the stance, destabilizing it.

Each critique is flawed; partly wrong, although not entirely mistaken. These flaws are also obvious, which is a reason it’s possible to adopt↗︎︎ materialism at times.

Meaningness rejects materialism from point of view of the complete stance↗︎︎. It regards all purposes, mundane and higher, as both nebulously↗︎︎ meaningful and nebulously meaningless. The next page explains that critique.

Eternalism’s rejection of materialism

Most people are committed↗︎︎ to eternalism in word, but often adopt↗︎︎ materialism in deed. The ubiquity of the discord between these two has not escaped the notice of the guardians of eternalistic religions, who devote much of their effort to condemning it.

There are two lines of attack: materialism leads you to selfishly violate God’s laws, and it distracts you from higher purposes↗︎︎ (which, in eternalist theisms, are God’s purposes). God’s laws generally require self-sacrifice, which is inimical to materialism. God says Thou Shalt Not, and materialism says “I’ll go for what I want.” God says Thou Shalt, and materialism asks “what’s in it for me?” And the tug of animal desires is so strong that, unless we constantly fight them, we will—according to most eternalist religions—lose sight of our true purpose, which is to please God.

Non-theistic eternalisms make similar critiques. For example, some political ideologies say materialism is the root of the destructive capitalist consumer culture. It creates unjust power and wealth inequalities, destroys the environment, and eliminates the possibility of cultural transcendence by filling our heads with mediocre mass entertainment.

The eternalist critique is correct, insofar as exclusive pursuit of fixed↗︎︎ mundane purposes is harmful—even to oneself.

Mission’s rejection of materialism

The critique of materialism from point of view of mission is similar to the eternalist critique. (So it is correct for the same reason, and to the same extent.) Materialism is selfish; it views other people as mere means or tools to the materialist’s shallow purposes. It is amoral. It values things over people, power over virtue, lust over love, consumption over generosity. A materialist may create works of enduring value, but only as a means of self-advancement or self-glorification.

The difference between eternalism’s and mission’s critiques is that mission sees mundane purposes as meaningless, and has no interest in their details. Eternalism fixates mundane purposes as well as higher ones; an eternalist religion may give detailed guidance on how you should live everyday life.

Nihilism’s rejection of materialism

The nihilist views the materialist as deluded. For the nihilist, there can be no real purpose. Only an idiot could believe that “he who dies with the most toys wins.” Mundane purposes are transient and empty—just as higher purposes are vain and imaginary.

… all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.1

Nihilism is right that purely personal, mundane purposes expire at death. That doesn’t make↗︎︎ them entirely meaningless, but it’s a factor important to consider. Meaning cannot be purely personal, and neither can purposes.

  • 1. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.

Materialism: defects and obstacles

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Materialism fails on its own terms.

Antidotes to fixating mundane purposes

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will cover a variety of antidotes to one of materialism↗︎︎’s two metaphysical errors: fixating↗︎︎ mundane purposes↗︎︎.

They provide freedom from the compulsive need-driven quality of mundane desires, and allow you enjoyment free from grasping.

Antidotes to denying higher purposes

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will cover a variety of antidotes to one of materialism↗︎︎’s two metaphysical errors: denying↗︎︎ higher purposes↗︎︎.

They allow you to recover compassion and creativity.

Mission and materialism mingled

This page is outdated. The text below is from the first, 2007 draft of Meaningness. My understanding of the material has changed since then, and the style I write in too. Someday I would like to rewrite this; but I hope the 2007 version may be adequate for now.

The defects of mission↗︎︎ and materialism↗︎︎ are well-known and experienced by us all. Because each is unworkable, they are unstable, and we adopt↗︎︎ both at different times, or in different parts of our lives. This also does not work. Trying to mix them is another approach.

Torn between mission and materialism

Alternately adopting mission and materialism can feel like a war between two parts of oneself.

  • The part committed↗︎︎ to mission claims to be morally pure, and casts the part committed to materialism as selfish and subhuman. Secretly it also knows that its self-denial is self-destructive, and wishes it could let go and enjoy life a bit more.
  • The part committed to materialism claims to be realistic and intelligent, and casts the part committed to mission as a hypocritical holier-than-thou simpleton. Secretly it also feels guilt and disappointment, and wishes it felt secure enough to be more generous.

This is a recipe for misery and dysfunction.1

The prominent Anglo-American philosopher M. Ciccone was famous for passionate commitment to materialism in her early work↗︎︎. Subsequently, however, influenced by the mystical philosophy Kabbalah, she explored the existential angst that comes of being torn between materialism and mission:

How high are the stakes?
How much fortune can you make?
Does this get any better?
Should I carry on?
Will it matter when I’m gone?
Will any of this matter?
Does it make a difference?
Nothing lasts forever.2

Muddled middles

A more sophisticated strategy seeks to mingle materialism and mission. This creates muddled middles↗︎︎: attempts to avoid the tension by finding a compromise. These can be categorized as giving higher purposes mundane uses or as giving mundane purposes higher meanings.

[There should be a diagram here, showing mission and materialism in between eternalism and nihilism, and then the two doubly-muddled middles between mission and materialism.]

Giving higher purposes mundane uses

In this mingling, one overtly pursues a higher purpose, with a covert mundane agenda. One might, for instance, aim for fame and glory while leading a celebrity media campaign to save starving Africans from poverty; or make zillions of dollars (and acquire a harem of groupies) as an “alternative” “rebellious” musician; or wield the power of life and death over millions, in the name of Protecting The People, as a demagogic politician.

On a more ordinary level, our motivations are rarely unmixed. When pursuing higher purposes, we almost always hope for some mundane reward, even if it is only a casual compliment from a friend. This is often sleazy and covert. That is not to say that we cannot be authentically compassionate or creative; just that there is a self-aggrandizing tendency operating at the same time.

Virtually every domain of human activity gets appropriated and distorted by materialism. We use every situation as a domain in which to conduct social actions of seduction, competition, and domination. Almost nothing is too trivial, nor too important, for a group to specialize in it; observe differences in ability, recognize champions, winners, and losers; hope for success in it and fear failure; and seek mates who are successful at it.

Any time we set out nominally to do something (even a noble, higher purpose—curing cancer perhaps), we are also to some extent using that project as a way to look virtuous, make money, gather power, or make ourselves more sexually attractive. We may be more or less aware of these additional motivations. Even if we were perfectly disinterested ourselves, the other people engaged in the activity would have these motivations. So it becomes impossible simply to do the thing; we can only do it plus materialism. Often the demands of materialism run counter to accomplishing the original project. Materialistic agendas are the main obstacle to many goals.

Giving mundane purposes higher meanings

This mingling strategy is the mirror image of the first. Here we pretend a plainly mundane purpose—such as material consumption—has some spurious higher one. This pretense aims to alleviate guilt about mundane purposes generated by the critiques of materialism. And, as a happy twofer, we can look good to other people at the same time!

As traditional bases for meaning have evaporated, hunger for alternative sources have made this an increasingly effective marketing approach↗︎︎. It presents products that you buy for mundane purposes as having higher ones, such as fair trade, saving the environment, educating starving children, purifying your chakras, sending a message to evil capitalists / perverted socialists, and so on. In principle, it is possible that such combinations could work, but when you investigate details it nearly always turns out that they have little if any effect. You may feel better about yourself—if you can maintain the delusion—but otherwise you are paying extra (a mundane loss) without the claimed higher benefit.

If feel you have adequately fulfilled your unwanted duty to higher purposes this way, you will be less likely↗︎︎ to pursue them realistically.3

Here is a short, clear explanation from Slavoj Žižek:

Starbucks is in the business of selling indulgences↗︎︎—of the sort Martin Luther railed against—absolving you of secular sins.

I’ll discuss this muddled middle further in the ethics chapter of Meaningness. I’ve also written about it in “ ‘Ethics’ is advertising↗︎︎.”

Almost right and completely wrong

The muddled middles are accurate in their implicit recognition that both mundane and higher purposes are meaningful, and that—realistically—we have no choice other than to pursue both.

They are inaccurate, and may not work well in practice, because they tacitly accept an absolute distinction between the two types of purpose. They try to achieve two purposes in a single activity. This fails to resolve the underlying tension.

So long as the types of purpose still seem opposed, the strategy pulls activity in two directions at once. That usually makes it both less effective and less enjoyable. “Fair trade” coffee does little if any good↗︎︎. And do you genuinely feel better for overpaying for it, or do you just feel that you’ve dutifully checked off an ethical chore?

The muddled middles preserve the self-indulgent, self-protective grasping of materialism, and the self-righteous justification of mission. That tends to lose the uncomplicated enjoyment-value of animal satisfaction (because we pretend that is not what we seek), and also the selfless compassionate joy of accomplishing higher purposes (because we have subordinated those to a materialist agenda).

  • 1. The Guru Papers explores this pattern in depth; I have summarized it here.
  • 2. Madonna, “How High,” on Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005). Cf. “Material Girl,” written by Peter Brown and Robert Rans, sung by Madonna on Like a Virgin (1984).
  • 3. Or so some social-psychology research claims, and it seems plausible! As of 2020, it’s hard to know what results in that field to take seriously, due to the replication crisis.

Enjoyable usefulness

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Enjoyable usefulness is the stance↗︎︎ that both eternal and mundane purposes are meaningful—when they are. Therefore, we can and should pursue both.

On the other hand, no purpose is ultimately↗︎︎ meaningful. That gives us freedom to choose; and means that we need not particularly fear failure.

This stance tends to lead to experiences of “flow” and enjoyable accomplishment.

On the other hand, it is unattractive because accomplishment gives no metaphysical validation. There is no basis for hope of salvation if only we try hard enough.

Want what you like

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

One defect of materialism↗︎︎ is fixating↗︎︎ mundane purposes↗︎︎, locking one into the idea that only a few things can bring you satisfaction in the material realm, and getting as much as possible of them is the meaning of life. That’s what you should want.

Meanwhile, mission↗︎︎ tells us that material enjoyment is a meaningless distraction from higher purposes↗︎︎. You shouldn’t want that.

Both these voices are wrong. Consequently, to varying extents, we do not know what we actually like and will enjoy, and therefore do not know what we should want. Finding out can be quite difficult, but highly worthwhile. (As well as surprisingly interesting!)

That is a prerequisite to the “enjoyable” part of enjoyable usefulness↗︎︎. See also the discussion of enjoyment in the chapter on the complete stance↗︎︎.

I have written about how to find out what you like, and nurture your desire for it and enjoyment of it, on another site, here↗︎︎ and here↗︎︎. This page will cover roughly the same material, in a very different style.

Personal value

Confusing image

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Much suffering and confusion comes from the idea that people could be either ordinary or special. This is a mistake. No one can be either one—no matter how hard we try. The belief that we must be one or the other obscures the reality of what we are, and the reality of what we can become.

So if we are neither, what are we? Mostly, what we are is confused. We are confused about our proper role in the world.

We know that we aren’t really special, because we recognize that we are essentially the same as everyone else. Although we secretly hope and suspect we might be special, we cannot figure out what our special role should be. We seek obscure omens and chase tentative possibilities, but they shift about and peter out. We recognize that people who present themselves as special are actually on harmful ego trips.

Yet we also know we aren’t really ordinary, because there are moments when we recognize our vast individual potential. No matter how hard we try to fit in, we secretly know that our innermost possibilities do not lie in going along with society. People who present themselves as ordinary are pretending to be herd animals—but no one is really fooled.

The problem is that we see no third possibility. So we jump back and forth between trying to be special or ordinary. We try to find some sort of compromise, or some way to be special in one part of our lives and otherwise ordinary. Mostly we try to bury the issue altogether, because it is so uncomfortable. But spiritual practice, life crises, and moments of grace keep bringing it to the surface.

Once we understand that, another, better possibility appears. That third alternative might be called nobility, or heroism.

Schematic overview: value

Stance↗︎︎SpecialnessOrdinarinessNobility
SummaryI have a distinct and superior value given by the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎My value comes from being like everyone elseDeveloping all my abilities in order to serve others
What it denies↗︎︎Shared humanityUnusualness
What it fixates↗︎︎Personal valuePersonal value
The sales pitchYou are better than they areDon’t put on airsBe all you can be
Emotional appealReinforces egoNo need to live up to potential
Pattern of thinkingDisdain; self-aggrandisementFearfulness, lazinessImpeccability
Likely next stancesMission↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎Materialism↗︎︎Enjoyable usefulness
AccomplishmentAutoapotheosisBaaaaaaHeroism
How it causes sufferingEgo-trips; role anxiety; need for constant confirmationSuppression of individuality
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceFamiliarity of experience; maintaining image is exhaustingUnusual impulses; cannot conform to herdSelfishness; fear; laziness
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsRecognition of shared humanityRecognition of potential and uniqueness
Intelligent aspectRecognition of potential and uniquenessRecognition of shared humanity
Positive appropriation after resolutionNobility↗︎︎ does rise above the ordinaryHumility is an aspect of nobility↗︎︎

Specialness

Special

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Although we all have an intuitive feeling for specialness and ordinariness, they are not easy to define. Specialness—as I am using the word—is not merely “extraordinary” or “better than most.” Nor is ordinariness just “what is common.”

Specialness is often confused with extraordinariness. Some people are extraordinary. They are talented, famous, beautiful, or accomplished, in ways others are not. Often they are mistakenly thought of as special. Maybe they can even convince themselves they are special—some of the time.

No amount of talent, fame, beauty, or accomplishment can make you feel consistently special, though. Extraordinary people feel ordinary much of the time. That can be highly disappointing. It is not possible to become special through our own actions, by doing something extraordinary.

The problem is that extraordinariness never manages to escape into the transcendent. People vary as to how strong or clever they are—but that is just something that happens, as a matter of ordinary variation. And talent, fame, beauty, and accomplishment fade—whereas it seems specialness should be eternal.

So what is specialness, then? A special person is singled out, from birth, for a particular role in the cosmic plan↗︎︎. Their life-course is laid out in the plan in a special way, giving it a special meaning and value. That does not depend on any objective, personal characteristics—although we might mistake those as evidence of specialness.

Since there is no cosmic plan to choose special people, there are no special people. It is actually impossible for anyone to be special.

That might be depressing, if the only alternative to being special was to be ordinary. Luckily, there are other possibilities.

Ordinariness

Ordinary sheep

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True humility requires the courage to risk greatness.
—Bert Hellinger

Ordinariness might seem the opposite of specialness↗︎︎. Actually, it is almost the same thing. What they have in common is the idea that our life has a definite proper course. The idea of ordinariness is that in the cosmic plan↗︎︎ our role is the same as most everyone else’s. It is right for us to do “what one does” and to live for no distinctive reason, without sticking out. It is wrong to pretend to be something fancy and special.

Because there is no cosmic plan, it is as impossible to be ordinary as it is to be special. No one is predestined to be a sheep. Yet we often waste a huge amount of emotional energy in trying to be ordinary, or trying to appear ordinary. That is because we are lazy and fearful. (Isn’t it interesting how often laziness drives us to take on impossible, exhausting tasks?)

We try to be ordinary when we think that living up to some idea of specialness would be too difficult. If we could be ordinary, we would not have the responsibility of living up to our potential. We feel justified in behaving badly, so long as we are stupid and unkind in common ways.

We try to be ordinary when we cannot imagine what our special role could be. We try to be ordinary when the uncertainty of the future is terrifying. “Being like everyone else” seems at least to offer the safety of a known outcome.

Nobility

Lion

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When we abandon our hope of a pre-packaged life-meaning, another possibility appears. We might call this “nobility” or “heroism.” Neither is a perfect word, but they point in the right direction.

Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others. Nobility is using whatever abilities we have in service of others. Nobility is seeking to fulfill our in-born human potential, and to develop all our in-born human qualities.

Because nobility is an intention, it is possible for everyone. Specialness tries to be better than ordinariness. It would only be possible to be special if most people were ordinary. Claims of specialness are based on uncommon qualities. It would not be possible for everyone to be special.

Everyone could be noble—and at times all of us are noble. It is not an accomplishment; it is a stance. But nobility is not easy. It is not easy to hold the intention continuously. It is not easy to abandon our laziness. It is not easy to let go of hope that one day we will discover our “true life-mission,” given by the cosmic plan↗︎︎. To be noble is not special—but it is extraordinary.

Specialness demands constant confirmation. That is because no one really can be special, and no one is special. The illusion of specialness is in constant danger of collapse. Nobility takes itself for granted, and needs no confirmation. When we have that intention, we have no doubt of it. Specialness aims at a brilliant destiny; nobility is always already complete.

Mere goodness is not nobility. Often we use goodness as a way of trying to be ordinary or special. Being “morally correct” in an ordinary, unimaginative, conformist way may be an excuse for avoiding the scary possibility of extraordinary goodness, or greatness. Doing good in a showy way can be a strategy for convincing ourselves, or others, that we are special. Celebrity charity work often seems to be that. Of course this is better than many other ways of trying to be special, but it somewhat misses the point. Specialness serves in order to rise, whereas nobility rises in order to serve.

The idea of being “noble” may sound remote or ridiculous. However, it is actually possible—whereas it is not possible to be either ordinary or special. Nobility is actually available to all of us in every moment, simply by choosing it. It is frightening; but to me it seems infinitely worthwhile.

Capability

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Schematic overview: capability

Stance↗︎︎Total responsibilityVictim-thinkLight-heartedness
SummaryWe each create our own reality and are responsible for everything that happens in itIt’s not my fault and I am too weak to deal with itPlayfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world
What it denies↗︎︎Contingency, limitsResponsibility, capability, freedom
What it fixates↗︎︎ResponsibilityOverwhelming power of circumstances
The sales pitchPerfect circumstances can be achieved with sufficient effortYou are oppressed and therefore blameless
Emotional appealFantasy of control over futureNo need to make any effortNo need for self-criticism or for anxiety
Pattern of thinkingAggressive, paranoidFearful, depressed, emotionally manipulativeEffortless accomplishment
Likely next stancesSpecialness↗︎︎, true self↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎Ordinariness↗︎︎, materialism↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, ethical responsiveness
AccomplishmentKing of the UniverseHave all needs met by exploiting others’ pityEffortless creativity
How it causes sufferingHypervigilance; can’t meet infinite requirements with finite capacityResentment, depression, neglect of opportunities
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObviousness of limitsObviousness of opportunitiesHard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsLetting go of fantasies of accomplishment; willingness to failGratitude; letting go of payoffs; walking away; practical action
Intelligent aspectRecognition of possibilityRecognition of limits
Positive appropriation after resolutionExperience depends more on our own perception & action than is usually thoughtBecause we have finite capabilities, we can cut ourselves some slack

Total responsibility

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The delusion that you are, or can be, totally responsible for “your” reality is prevalent in some religious and psychotherapeutic circles.

Victim-think

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Victim-think is a strategy for denying all responsibility. “Since I have no power, it’s not my fault, and you can’t expect me to deal with it.”

Victim-think is versatile; you can deploy it in many ways, varying across several axes. It applies to individuals and to social groups. It can be first person (I or we are victims), or third person (he/she/they are victims). You can use it as an excuse for bad behavior, or as a plea for aid. Those can be directed at powerful people or institutions, or at God or some other eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.

Some common patterns of use:

  • Maybe I did steal that, but I am having a hard time. It’s society’s fault.
  • My social group is victimized, so we are justified in attacking members of another one.
  • I know this relationship is bad for both of us, but I’m too weak to end it.
  • That social group is oppressed, so the authorities should give them special privileges.
  • That guy is a member of an oppressed group, so you can’t hold him responsible for his criminal act.

Each of these may be accurate in rare cases. More often, they are harmful distortions, and covert power-plays.

Generally, it’s rare for anyone to bear no responsibility for their actions—just as total responsibility is rare or impossible. These extreme, confused stances↗︎︎ are attractive because they simplify moral reasoning, and can be used as weapons in social conflicts.

Mostly, everyone involved has partial control over events, which makes questions of moral responsibility complex and inherently nebulous↗︎︎. We may not like that, but any serious ethics or politics has to acknowledge and work with reality as it is, not as we would like it to be.

Light-heartedness

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Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world.

Ethics

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[This chapter is mainly unwritten. In the mean time, I've written about ethics in a Buddhist framework on another site. The approach I take there is mainly consistent with what I will eventually write here. This page there↗︎︎ sketches the path to a complete stance↗︎︎ for ethics. This one↗︎︎ fills in some more details, although in retrospect I find it unnecessarily obscure.]

Available systems↗︎︎ of ethics are dysfunctional. They ignore nearly all the ethical questions people actually have. Academic and theological answers are useless, not because they are wrong, but because they address questions no one cares about.

Our most pressing ethical questions—such as “how ethical should I be?”—cannot even be asked within existing systems, much less answered correctly. And so, in practice, everyone has abandoned the systems.

Unconstrained by systems, ethical claims have proliferated as metastatic cancers of meaning, infiltrating tumors into every organ of culture.

Useful analysis has to start over—but not from scratch. We all do ask the questions that matter, and not all our answers are wrong. Everyday ethical experience goes most of the way toward an accurate ethical analysis.

The structure of this chapter should be familiar by now: it looks at an opposing pair of confused stances↗︎︎ that share a mistaken metaphysical assumption; diagnoses the mistake as a failure to appreciate the nebulosity↗︎︎ of the topic (ethics); and develops the complete stance↗︎︎ that recognizes the inseparability of the nebulosity and pattern↗︎︎ of the topic.

The underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption is that, to be meaningful, ethics must have a definite, objective foundation.

Ethical eternalism assumes there must be a correct ethical system that accurately reflects the objective reality. (This is a classic example of wistful certainty: there must be one, otherwise the universe would be bad and wrong, and that’s unthinkable.)

One main reason for clinging to eternalism in general is the fear that without an eternal ordering principle↗︎︎, ethics is impossible. It is thought that ethics must be based in a transcendent source such as God or Rationality or Progress. Fortunately, that is not the case. Ethics arises, reliably, from the patterned interaction of innumerable factors. It does not require a definite foundation.

All existing eternalistic ethical theories are not merely wrong, they’re entirely irrelevant to the issues we actually care about. The ones they obsess over (deontology vs. consequentialism, trolley problems, what Jesus would have said) no one cares about. Those are quite unlike the ethical questions we typically encounter.

Ethical nihilism recognizes (accurately) that ethics has no ultimate foundation, but then concludes that ethics is merely subjective and/or meaningless. This is wrong; it seems plausible only if one fails to challenge the underlying metaphysical assumption about the nature of ethics.

Ethical responsiveness rejects the assumption and so can develop an accurate ethical practice.

Since this three-fold pattern of analysis is now familiar, I can dispose of ethical eternalism and ethical nihilism reasonably quickly.

Most of the chapter is devoted to an exploration of everyday ethical practice. Ethics is not a system of reasons (as in consequentialism and deontology), nor of personal traits (as in virtue ethics). It is patterns of situated social practice. “Situated” means that it is unboundedly dependent on context. “Social practice” means that it is inherently collaborative, improvisational, and interpretive.

I discuss numerous ethical phenomena that everyone encounters regularly, that we actually care about, and that are mostly or entirely ignored by existing ethical theories. I’ll address these both from an informal, participant-observer point of view, and based on recent research in evolutionary psychology and sociology. Along the way, I gradually introduce my normative judgements, pointing toward “responsiveness.”

How ethical should I be?

This question comes up several times a day for most people, I believe. There is no existing ethical framework in which it can even be asked, much less answered. I think that’s a serious problem. People are disappointed by ethics and religion because they don’t get an answer, and that has negative consequences.

I use the question to introduce the flavor of my approach. It’s also a “forcing question”: trying to answer it uncovers a series of related issues in everyday ethical practice, which might otherwise be overlooked.

My first answer is that we should all be much less ethical. This answer is somewhat flip, and I’ll take it through a series of qualifications, modifications, and reverses. However, it’s also quite serious. The absence of a workable ethical framework leads us to devote great effort to applying ethics in domains where it’s the wrong tool. We should all stop doing that.

Ethical nebulosity, ethical anxiety, and ethical ease

[We cannot be certain about ethics because the topic is inherently nebulous. This leads to ethical anxiety. Ethical anxiety motivates much dysfunction, at both personal and whole-society levels. It is mainly unnecessary, however. Accepting the interplay of nebulosity and pattern dissolves most of it.]

Ethical value and ethical metastasis

[There are many forms of value: pragmatic value, aesthetic value, religious value, and ethical value among them. Over the past century, pluralism and relativism have eroded all types of value other than pragmatic and ethical. This leads to mis-using ethics as a stand-in for other non-pragmatic forms of value, notably sacredness. This ethical metastasis is hugely harmful. (I will analyze many specific cases.) I advocate de-ethicizing various domains and restoring them to their proper value-types.]

Ethical display, ethical fungibility, and values marketing

[Ethical display is communicating your ethical position. I'm using the word "display" in the ethnomethodological sense; it's closely related to "signaling" in evolutionary psychology and economics. (I've written at length about ethical signaling elsewhere↗︎︎.)]

[Ethical fungibility is the idea that you can be less ethical in one situation if you've been more ethical than required in another. (Or, if you want to be less ethical now, you can promise to yourself that you'll make it up later.) There's an implicit sense of "karmic bank account" involved. We all do this, although it leads us to do wrong things. It makes intuitive sense due to the absence of a coherent approach to the question "how ethical should I be?".]

[Values marketing exploits ethical fungibility by adding small amounts of "ethics" to products in order to justify a much higher price tag. "Fair trade" coffee is the canonical example. People buy it to alleviate ethical anxiety and to build up their ethical bank balance. Starbucks is in the business of selling indulgences, in the Pre-Reformation sense!]

Ethical agreement

[Most supposed ethical disagreements are not genuinely about ethics, but about other value-types, or are display strategies. In fact, nearly everyone in modern societies agrees about nearly everything. Recognizing this alleviates ethical anxiety and promotes ethical freedom.]

Ethical freedom

[Here I discuss freedom from ethics. Often choice of action is not an ethical issue: you can do what you want. Ethical considerations are often not overriding (even where they apply at all). This is tremendously important, because creativity and enjoyment live in the zone between "must" and "must not."]

Ethical responsiveness: the complete stance

[Treating ethics as a situated social practice, we can ask: what tools and skills are available? How can we do this better?]

Schematic overview: ethics

Stance↗︎︎Ethical eternalismEthical nihilismEthical responsiveness
SummaryThe Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ dictates a fixed ethical code according to which we ought to liveEthics is a meaningless human invention and has no real claim on usEthics is centrally important to humans, and is not a matter of choice, but is fluid and has no definite source
What it denies↗︎︎Ambiguity of ethics; freedom; courage; creativityEthical imperativeness
What it fixates↗︎︎Ethical code (rules/laws)Absence of ethical absolutes
The sales pitchCosmic justice guarantees reward/punishment if you obey/defy the ethical codeDo as thou wilt shall be the whole of the LawEthical anxiety is unnecessary
Emotional appealAvoiding blame; preventing others from harming/offending youTake what you want; don’t let morality get in the way
Pattern of thinkingSelf-righteousnessArroganceLight-hearted concern
Likely next stancesReligiosity↗︎︎, mission↗︎︎Secularism↗︎︎, materialism↗︎︎Light-heartedness, nobility↗︎︎
AccomplishmentRemorseless soldier of GodSociopathyEthical maturity
How it causes sufferingHarmful actions are sometimes required by the supposed rules; beneficial ones may not be promotedWithout ethics, harmful actions are just rational self-interest
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceSituations in which ethical rules are unclear or promote obvious harmNatural concern for othersRequires close attention to particulars; no guarantee of blamelessness
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsAllowing ethical ambiguityRespecting ethical imperatives
Intelligent aspectRecognizes the importance of ethicsRecognizes the ambiguity of ethics
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward nobility↗︎︎Points toward ethical maturity

Ethical eternalism

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There must be a correct ethical system that reliably determines right and wrong. Adopting it will guarantee we will always do and be good, not evil.

This is the founding assumption of ethical eternalism↗︎︎. It’s pure wishful thinking—wistful certainty. There’s no reason to believe such a system exists; in any case, we certainly haven’t found it, after millennia of trying. So don’t hold your breath waiting for it before making ethical decisions.

Religious ethical systems can be maintained only through faith, in the face of contradictions—increasingly unattractive.

The ethical systems promoted by academic philosophers are equally implausible, even if they are supported by reams of complicated arguments. Bizarrely, advocates of each agree it has profound flaws they have no idea how to fix, and yet… since there must be a right system, their arguments boil down to “our fundamental flaws look less bad than yours.”

  • “Consequentialism is at least coherent, even if it gives obviously wrong answers most of the time”
  • “Deontology at least gives right answers in typical situations”
  • “Virtue ethics at least doesn’t insist that you do obviously wrong things, like the other two do”

Since there are well-known, excellent refutations for each eternalist ethical system, this page doesn’t need to go into much detail.

Rather, it will simply point out that eternalist ethics is bound to fail, because ethical issues are inherently nebulous↗︎︎. Worse than just being wrong, eternalism provides unbounded certainty for ethical opinions, which leads to extremism, and catastrophic atrocities committed on the basis of moral absolutism.

Ethical nihilism

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Ethical nihilism is the stance↗︎︎ that ethical claims are all entirely meaningless.

This is wildly implausible, and probably no one can really adopt↗︎︎ it, even if some gloomy philosophers claim to be committed↗︎︎ to it. So this page can be blessedly brief.

Ethical responsiveness

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Authority

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Schematic overview: authority

Stance↗︎︎Reasonable respectabilityRomantic rebellionFreedom
SummaryContribute to social order by conforming to traditionsMake an artistic statement by defying authorityValue social order as a resource; satirize it as an impediment
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎ of social orderValue of social order
What it fixates↗︎︎Social orderHeroic status of the counter-culture
The sales pitchLaw’n’orderDeath to the oppressors!
Emotional appealIt’s safeIt’s sexy
Pattern of thinkingEmotional constrictionConfused romantic passion, testosterone poisoningPolitical maturity
Likely next stancesOrdinariness↗︎︎; dualism↗︎︎Specialness↗︎︎; mission↗︎︎; nihilistic rage; true self↗︎︎Nobility↗︎︎, light-heartedness, kadag
AccomplishmentPillar of societyRomantic martyrdom
How it causes sufferingComplicity in oppression; abandoning of responsibility and moral maturityOpposes realistic action to ameliorate conditions; justifies violence
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceSocial conventions stifle expression and opportunitySilly; doomed by definitionUrgency of social imperatives
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsWho cares what they think?I’m being silly and just striking a pose to look cool
Intelligent aspectRecognizes value of social orderRecognizes arbitrary and restrictive character of social order
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward kingly qualities of nobility↗︎︎; society as a beneficial structurePoints toward warrior qualities of nobility↗︎︎; charismatically involving; makes splendid art

Reasonable respectability

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Reasonable respectability: the sheep’s stance to social authority.

Romantic rebellion

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I have a fair amount of text completed, but not a clean version yet. The following is from the 2007 draft of Meaningness. It draws heavily on Camus’ The Rebel↗︎︎.

Romantic rebellion starts from denying the “omnibenevolent” clause in Problem of Evil. Since there is undeserved suffering, the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎ is not good after all. Therefore the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ must be defied. (This can apply to any source of order seen as corrupt, including God, Fate, The Establishment, “the artistic mainstream,” “oppressors,” or whatever.)

The first problem with romantic rebellion is that it is necessarily doomed, because it doesn’t actually deny the eternal principle, it merely defies it. The Authority remains omnipotent, or at any rate vastly more powerful than the rebel. So the enterprise is obviously hopeless from the start.

As a result, there is a certain lack of seriousness about the whole business. The rebel wants to convince himself that he’s extremely committed and that defying God is massively courageous, but it’s all quite silly. “Dream the impossible dream” & tilt after windmills. It’s about glory, not practical consequences. Romantic rebellion is romantic because it is based in passion, not reason.

Recognizing this impracticality, the rebel must denigrate the possibility that things can actually be changed for the better. The rebel sees ordinary, pragmatic benevolence or reform as the enemy, because it draws attention away from the necessity of rejecting the existing order in toto. The rebel “can only exist by defiance”.1 Any sort of moderation is also the enemy, because again it implies a degree of acceptance of what is. Total destruction is (in theory) the aim. Typically, the logic of romantic rebellion makes any actual destruction unnecessary, but there is always a danger that moral confusion plus romantic logic will lead to acts of terrorism. Mass murder on the scale of saturation bombing and concentration camps is not romantic, but suicide bombing—and destroying people’s careers using social media—can be.

On the other hand, actual retaliation from The Authority seems unlikely. (If genuine defense against The Authority becomes necessary, rebellion ceases to be romantic and becomes unpleasantly practical.)

The second problem is that romantic rebellion does not identify an alternative coherent source of value. (If you set up such a source, you’d have a new, different eternalism↗︎︎; a different move.) Lacking such a source, romantic rebellion somewhat arbitrarily extols some of what was previously seen as good as evil, and vice versa. The two are blended. Extolling “the outlaw, the criminal with a heart of gold, and the kind brigand.”2 “The romantic hero, therefore, considers himself compelled to do evil by his nostalgia for an impracticable good.”3

In the Rudra move, one takes oneself to be the source of value. But the romantic rebel does not have the guts to do that, or has enough sense not to.

The romantic rebel actually recognizes his or her own confusion about values, and this is a source of suffering. This is a specifically romantic suffering that the rebel celebrates. It is a badge of honor.

Since there is no realistic hope or method for overthrowing The Authority, there is nothing practical for the rebel to do. What is left is to maintain an attitude of opposition. Quietly maintaining an attitude by oneself is not very exciting, however; and romantic rebellion is all about faux heroism.

Romantic rebellion is, therefore, necessarily a social activity. What is important is not simply to maintain an attitude, but to strike an attractive pose. One must be seen to be maintaining an attitude.

To be seen as a rebel, one must join in a Movement that forms the audience for one’s heroic pose. Further, one looks to The Movement for confirmation of one’s uncertain value judgements.

Within The Movement, the important thing is looking cool—since actually warring against God is hopeless, and actually doing anything useful undercuts the total rejection of the existing state of affairs. The actual source of value is personal glory. This entails playing to an audience; “always compelled to astonish”.4

Romantic rebellion doesn’t work as theology (though people have tried; Satanism, for instance).

Romantic rebellion also makes for lousy politics. Striking defiant poses is not a workable basis for government—although it is the main activity of most contemporary politicians. Not to mention Islamist terrorists.

Romantic rebellion is a lot of fun, though, and can have terrific aesthetic value throughout the arts. E.g., rock’n’roll is all about romantic rebellion.

Sympathy For The Devil. Paradise Lost.

  • 1. Camus, p. 47.
  • 2. Camus, p. 46.
  • 3. Camus, p. 44.
  • 4. Camus, p. 48.

Freedom

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Value social order as a resource; satirize it as an impediment.

Sacredness

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Schematic overview: sacredness

Stance↗︎︎ReligiositySecularismKadag
SummaryThe sacred and the profane are clearly distinct in the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎Sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacredBecause nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred
What it denies↗︎︎Nebulosity↗︎︎ of sacredness; vastnessSacredness; vastness
What it fixates↗︎︎The sacredArbitrariness of perception of sacredness
The sales pitchAvoid contamination through ritual purityFreed from religion, we can get on with practical projectsThe good bits of religion without the dogma
Emotional appealPersonal superiority through religious conformity; minimize uncanniness of vastness by codifying itDon’t have to think about that uncomfortable religion stuff; pretend you don’t see vastness and hope it goes awayCan neither dismiss nor grab onto sacredness
Pattern of thinkingSelf-righteousnessPretending not to care about meaning; apathyAwe
Likely next stancesReasonable respectability, mission↗︎︎, specialness↗︎︎Materialism↗︎︎, ordinariness↗︎︎Freedom
AccomplishmentPerfect ritual purityTotal inability to experience aweAbility to experience anything as sacred
How it causes sufferingParanoia about contamination; resources and opportunities wasted; tribalist vilification Flatness of existence in the absence of the sacred
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObvious mundanity of religious formsSpontaneous religious feelingsInnate reactions of disgust
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsPurity is a matter of perception, not truthI do sometimes experience awe
Intelligent aspectRecognition of sacrednessRecognition that nothing is inherently sacred
Positive appropriation after resolutionSacredness mattersNarrow religion is harmful; something better is available

Religiosity

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Religiosity is the confused, eternalistic view that the sacred and profane can be clearly separated.

Secularism

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As used here, secularism is the stance that sacredness is mere superstition; nothing is sacred.

Kadag

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Because nothing is inherently sacred, everything can be sacred.

I have written a page on a closely related topic on Approaching Aro↗︎︎.

Contingency

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Schematic overview: contingency

Stance↗︎︎CausalityChaosFlow
SummaryEverything happens for the best, in accord with the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. (Except free will lets us do evil.)The universe is random; nothing happens for any particular reasonThere are no ultimate causes, and causation is nebulous↗︎︎, but we naturally observe patterns↗︎︎
What it denies↗︎︎Pointless sufferingInterpretability
What it fixates↗︎︎Reasons[Nothing]
The sales pitchThere is no need to suffer, so long as you conform to the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎[This is a hard sell ] God is dead. Dance with reality
Emotional appealCan pretend there is no pointless suffering[This may be only a theoretical possibility]
Pattern of thinkingKitschDespairRealism
Likely next stancesEternalism↗︎︎, religiosityNihilism↗︎︎, secularism
AccomplishmentPollyanna, CandideLa Nausé (Sartre)Maximal ability to influence events, without attachment to outcome
How it causes sufferingDenying pointless suffering makes it hard to alleviate[Theoretically, inability to take practical action]
Obstacles to maintaining the stanceObviousness of pointless suffering (our own and others’)Obviousness of causalityNo guarantees
Antidotes; counter-thoughtsLots of stuff just happens[Probably not necessary]
Intelligent aspectThings often do make senseThings often are inherently uninterpretable
Positive appropriation after resolutionPoints toward pragmatic competencePoints toward comfort with uncertainty

Causality

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Chaos

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Flow

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

There are no ultimate causes, and causation is nebulous, but we naturally observe patterns.

Meaningness and Time: past, present, future

Western culture, society, and selves have disintegrated.

The bottom has fallen out of the bucket.

This is common knowledge. It is just a fact—for worse and for better. It happened. Spilt milk. No use wringing hands.

Instead, ask: now what?

The problems of meaningness↗︎︎ we face now are dramatically different from those of a half-century ago. We also sense new opportunities, and have new resources.

To relate better with meaningness in the future, it helps to understand how meaningness works now. To understand that, it helps to understand how it worked differently in the past.

So, Meaningness and Time begins with a history. It describes a chronological series of modes of relating with meaningness. I concentrate on the history of the past few decades—the period that some theorists call “postmodern.”

Modernity can be seen as a few centuries of trying to make eternalism↗︎︎ into a systematic organizing principle for culture, society, and self. This began to seem dubious a century ago, and the twentieth century was haunted by the specter of nihilism↗︎︎. That was the great twentieth century problem of meaningness.

Late in the century, many people concluded that systematic eternalism had finally collapsed. Yet the nihilist apocalypse↗︎︎ failed to arrive—at least not in the form feared. (Too much meaning is now a huge problem; absence of all meaning is not.) So then what, if neither eternalism nor nihilism?

The past half century has brought a succession of approaches to answering that, which I call the countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes. Each has responded to a crisis of meaning created by the previous mode, and each has produced new serious problems.

That brings us to the present—the atomized mode of tiny jagged shards of meaning-stuff: globalized, commodified, decontextualized; a kaleidoscopic, hypnotizing, senseless spectacle. (Twitter↗︎︎, in other words.)

We cannot go back; each former mode was superseded because it did conclusively fail to provide what we needed from meaning. How can we go forward?

I sense, tentatively, a new mode emerging, which I’ll call fluidity. Perhaps, if I am right that there even is such a thing, it will manifest dire new problems of its own.

I’m hopeful, though, that it’s workable in ways that other recent modes were not. It approximates the complete stance↗︎︎, just as modernity approximated eternalism↗︎︎ and postmodernity approximates nihilism↗︎︎. If the complete stance is accurate and functional, then the fluid mode should be too.

How meaning fell apart

Girl exploring modern ruins at Gunkanjima Island
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Jordy Meow

My suggestions for how meaningness↗︎︎ may evolve in the near future, and how best to relate to it, are based on an understanding of changes in recent history. I propose a series of modes of relating to meaningness that have developed over the past few decades. Each mode solves particular problems of meaningness caused by the previous mode; but introduces new problems of its own.

This page introduces the modes; chapters within this history explain the modes and their implications in detail.

A very brief history of meaningness

The choiceless mode is unaware that alternative meanings are possible. This is the mode of closed cultures; of societies isolated from other peoples. It has not existed in the West for several centuries, and is increasingly rare world-wide.

The problem: When cultures come into contact, they experience conflicts over meanings. Other peoples do things differently; their beliefs seem obviously wrong to us. But they think our beliefs and practices are wrong. How do we know ours are right?

The solution: The systematic mode tries to solve this problem by creating unarguable foundations, to restore certainty. This mode is closely allied with eternalism↗︎︎, although not all eternalism is systematic. The systematic mode is universalist; it says that meanings are the same for everyone, everywhere, eternally.

The new problem: During the twentieth century, it became apparent that attempts to build unshakable foundations had failed, and suspicion grew that it was actually impossible. That raised the threat of nihilism↗︎︎: perhaps everything is actually meaningless?

By the 1960s, mainstream systematic society and culture had become obviously dysfunctional. They failed to provide adequate meaningfulness, and there was general revulsion at the mainstream’s nihilistic moral breakdown.

The new solution: The countercultural mode developed in response. It came in two flavors, the monist↗︎︎ counterculture (the hippie movement) and the dualist↗︎︎ counterculture (the Moral Majority). These movements proposed universalist systems of meaning that were alternatives to the mainstream. Although rhetorically opposed, the two countercultures were structurally similar, shared historical roots, and had more in common than is usually recognized.

The next problem: The universalism of the countercultures was a fatal flaw. Their new visions were both unable to appeal to a majority. They were unable to encompass the diversity of views on meaningness now found within societies (and across the world). Because they were mass movements, they could not provide community.

The next solution: The subcultural mode abandoned universalism, and with it the attempt to find ultimate↗︎︎ foundations for meaning. Instead, subcultures provided numerous “neotribal↗︎︎” systems of meaning that were meant to appeal only to small communities of like-minded people. Some subcultures explicitly extolled nihilism.

The problem with that: Subcultures proved unable to provide either the breadth or depth of meaning people need. Also, lacking strong organizing principles, they repeatedly fissioned in response to differences in view. This is most obvious in the case of subcultures centered on musical genres. The Wikipedia article on heavy metal subgenres↗︎︎ is worth a look. Heavy metal is a subgenre of rock, the primary countercultural genre, and spawned a subculture. Death metal is a subsubgenre. Melodic death and technical death are subsubsubgenres.

Around the end of the millennium, subcultures reached the limit of fragmentation, and the mode became unworkable. You can try to live the melodic death lifestyle, but it’s not going to answer most of your questions about Life, The Universe, And Everything. The attempt to provide coherent meanings without foundations had failed. Meaning disintegrated altogether.

What came next: The atomized mode takes incoherence for granted. It does not seem a problem, in this mode; we don’t need systems. Meanings do not hang together. They are delivered as bite-sized morsels in a jumbled stream, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Or—to use the thing itself as a metaphor for itself—like Twitter↗︎︎.

The problems we have now: Throughout the twentieth century, from the beginning of the breakdown of the mainstream systems until the breakdown of subcultures, the underlying worry was “not enough meaning.” The atomized mode delivers, for the first time, way too much meaning. It is overwhelming, like trying to drink from a firehose.

Because the shards of meaning do not relate with each other, it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial. The collapse of subcultural community has atomized society, and we find it impossible to construct satisfactory selves from the jagged fragments of meaning we’re bombarded with.

Now what: A new fluid mode may address our current problems of meaningness. My understanding of fluidity is tentative; it’s based partly on observation of current trends, and partly on the intrinsic logic of meaningness.

The fluid mode approximates the complete stance↗︎︎, which incorporates the accurate insights of eternalism and nihilism: recognizing that meaningness is always both patterned↗︎︎ and nebulous↗︎︎. Likewise, the fluid mode acknowledges structures of meaning without attempting rigid foundations. Its values are collaboration, creativity, improvisation, intimacy, transience, aesthetics, and spiritual depth through community ritual.

The fluid mode goes meta to the process that generated the previous modes. It understands how each solved serious problems of meaningness. It’s therefore able to use each of those solutions when similar problems arise.

Periods, people, cultures, and categories

The various modes appeared at different times; but none of them entirely displaced previous ones. Each arose among some leading-edge group, spread as its solutions became widely understood, and diminished gradually as its own problems became obvious and the next mode mostly replaced it.

Anyone living in the West now can relate to meaningness in any of the modes, and sometimes does. However, which mode seems most natural, and which mode one uses most often, varies from person to person.

It seems that the way one relates to meaningness is learned when one is roughly 15–25 years old; and for most people it is difficult to change after that. The mode that feels native is likely the one prevalent in your peer group at that age. Newer modes seem unattractive and unnatural. Their problems are more obvious than the opportunities they offer. For example, many in the Baby Boom generation remain loyal to their counterculture, even though they have participated in subcultures, and experience atomization when they use the internet.

People have different preferences in relating to change. Some would rather be at the hip leading edge, and are likely to adopt the modes typical of younger generations; some prefer the safety of the trailing edge.

Nations and cultures, too, vary in the speed at which they adopt new modes of meaningness. The Islamic world, for instance, has only partly transitioned from the choiceless to the systematic mode, and is mostly unable to cope yet with the following ones. Some poor countries are being forced by the internet from the choiceless world directly into the atomized one; that’s extremely difficult.

Since none of the modes is fully functional, none constitutes straightforward progress. I’m sympathetic to the conservative impulse to resist these changes and stick with a mode that seems to mostly work. Later in this section, I’ll write about the risks and costs of too-fast change. However, I believe the only way out is through. And, I hope that the fluid mode will be able to incorporate the valuable aspects of all the others.

You may be skeptical of my “modes” as categories; you may find them simplistic, and counterexamples may come to mind. If so, you are quite right. They are meant as “ideal types↗︎︎”: heuristic conceptual categories that illuminate some trends, while inevitably distorting others. They are not meant as ontological; they have no existence in the real world.

In fact, after finishing this history, I will demolish it. The whole thing is a lie. There are no modes; we are always “in the fluid mode” because meaningness has always been both patterned↗︎︎ and nebulous↗︎︎. No culture or society was ever actually systematic, for the same reason no one can actually be an eternalist: nebulosity is always obvious. No culture or society can actually be atomized, for the same reason no one can actually be a nihilist: patterns are always obvious.

The analysis of modes is useful for the same reason as the analysis of confused stances↗︎︎. Though we are, in some sense, always in the complete stance, and always in the fluid mode, we try to imagine otherwise. That can have catastrophic consequences.

Sources and similar analyses

Most of this history may be familiar; I may have nothing original to say. I’ve drawn on at least five sources:

  • The standard historical analysis of modernity, nihilism, and postmodernity
  • The sociology of American generational attitudes
  • My personal experience living through most of the modes
  • Adult developmental psychology
  • Vajrayana Buddhist theory

My explanations of the choiceless (“traditional”) and systematic (“modern”) modes, the threat of nihilism, the rise of the monist counterculture, and the end of modernity are all standard intellectual history. “Postmodernity”—a historical concept that is now widely accepted—corresponds to the subcultural and atomized modes.

I began thinking about the history of meaningness when trying to understand why Buddhism appeals much more to Western Baby Boomers than to younger people. The answers I wrote in 2009↗︎︎ and in 2011↗︎︎ were early versions of the history I’m presenting here.

I discovered that there is as much of a generation gap between Buddhists of Generation X and Generation Y as between the Boomers and Gen X. That lead me to read about generational differences, which helped me understand that “postmodernity” includes two quite different modes (subcultural and atomized), which are native for Generations X and Y respectively.

I seemed to have as much in common with Gen Y as with Gen X. (Probably that is because I am a perpetual adolescent and refuse to grow up. I’ve never owned a house, married, had children, or—arguably—ever had a “real” job.)

Affinity with Gen Y made me realize that I could understand cultural, social, and psychological change through my own experience and memories. I’ve lived through most of the history I describe. Each successive mode has radically changed the way I’ve lived, and the way I experience my self. I grew up in a museum of mainstream systematic culture; tried to be a hippie in my early twenties (though it was too late); enthusiastically participated in numerous subcultures through the ’80s and ’90s; experienced the dissolution of subculturalism, found myself atomized by the internet; and am now groping for fluidity.

Reflecting on the changes in my experience of meaningness led to the problem/solution framework I present here. Its details may be original. However, it’s structurally similar to theories of adult psychological development such as that of Robert Kegan, in The Evolving Self↗︎︎, which influenced me heavily in my twenties. Kegan’s framework↗︎︎ concerns “meaning-making,” and suggests that each developmental stage solves problems created by the previous one.

Spiral Dynamics extrapolates such theories from psychological to cultural development. Roughly, its beige, purple, and red memes correspond to the choiceless mode; blue and orange to the systematic mode; green to the monist counterculture; and yellow to the fluid mode. It doesn’t seem to include anything corresponding to the countercultural/subcultural/atomized distinctions (just as the theory of postmodernity does not).

In Kegan’s framework, and in Spiral Dynamics, each developmental stage goes meta to the last, so that whatever was previously experienced as “subject” becomes “object,” and a new subject, or self, emerges to reflect on it. Also, the stages alternate between excesses of individuation and social embeddedness. I love the elegance of this structure, but it mostly doesn’t fit the changes I’m writing about. Instead, I see each mode as containing the seeds of its own destruction, because its supposed solution becomes the next problem.

The final influence on my story is the Vajrayana Buddhist theory of form, emptiness, and non-duality; or eternalism, nihilism, and Dzogchen (the Tibetan word for “completion”). The Vajrayana understanding of “nihilism” is close to the Western one, and “eternalism” is analogous to Western understandings of foundationalism↗︎︎, which is the philosophical basis for the systematic mode. Vajrayana’s analysis of the failures of both nihilism and eternalism echoes that of current Western philosophy; but it claims also to provide a solution that avoids the problems of both by incorporating the insights of both. That was the starting point for Meaningness, this book. The central claim of the book is that complete stances can resolve the problems of the confused stances. Similarly, I hope that the fluid mode can resolve the problems of postmodernity.

Incorporating this Vajrayana view points toward a possible solution—fluidity—whose details might not be predictable in other frameworks.

A gigantic chart that explains absolutely everything

This chart is an overview of Meaningness and Time: the past, present, and future of culture, society, and our selves. It shows how the modes of meaningness↗︎︎ manifest in many aspects of life.

Some people find this sort of systematic presentation helpful; others do not. Skip it if you are one of those who don’t.

It probably won’t fit in your browser window, and you’ll have to scroll horizontally. Sorry about that. (The title of this page mocks its unwieldiness and ambition.)

Mode Choiceless Successful systems Systems in crisis Countercultures Subcultures Atomization Fluidity
Era (all dates approximate and are for leading-edge societies) Over by 1700 1450-1914 1914-1980; native for those born before WWII 1964-1990; native for Baby Boom generation 1975-2001; native for Generation X 2001-?; native for Millennials Hypothetical present or near future
Problems this mode addresses, created by the previous one [None] Challenge of alternatives. How do we know our way is right and all others are wrong? Failure of all foundations. Nihilism: meaninglessness, materialism, disenchantment of the world Failure of mainstream culture, society, and self to provide meaning; disgust at hypocrisy, business-as-usual, and moral breakdown Countercultures deny diversity, are revealed as idealistically impractical, fail to find new foundations; mass movement cannot provide community Subculture does not provide adequate breadth or depth of meaning; exploitation/parasitism relationship with mass-scale culture and society Overwhelming ocean of meaning; triviality (distraction from value judgement); perceived tensions between internet and “real life”; collapsing legacy systematic-mode institutions
Attempted solution [None needed] Supposed foundations for certainty: scripture, rationality, science, personal or collective revelation. Rational, universal, coherent Totalitarianism (attempt to force systems to work); existentialism (attempt to create personal meaning out of nothing) Alternatives (monist and dualist). Universalist (supposed to be right for everyone). Explicitly anti-nihilist. Draws heavily on 1800s Romanticism; abandons rationality Subcultures provide diverse bodies of meaning, without attempting foundations. Exclusivity limits group size to provide community. Abandons universality Global consumer culture provides conveniently-packaged morsels of meaning to cover all eventualities. Abandons coherence Watercraft on the sea of meanings. Meta-systematic, complete stance: reinstates rationality, universality, coherence, but recognizes their nebulosity
Culture Incoherent traditions, accepted without question Attempts to formalize/ rationalize/ systematize culture. Classicism followed by Romanticism. Development of avant-garde; beginning of the “culture war” Development of new cultures as self-conscious, positive mass alternative. Collapse of high culture/pop culture distinction Repeated fissioning of subcultures. Genre obsession. Hipsterism. Quest for “authenticity.” Postmodernism. Universal soup of tiny culture-bits. Kaleidoscopic, hypnotic, senseless reconfiguration. Groundless creative production; awareness of the intertwining of nebulosity and pattern; synergistic remix. Collaborative, improvised, intimate
Society Unquestioned, simple social structure Complex, rationalized social structure; bureaucracy Social structures increasingly diverse and problematic; competing political theories; world wars and clash of civilizations Brotherhood of all counterculture participants Subcultural tribalism: communities based on narrow but innovative shared values/interests. Rituals replace belief systems. Global society moves into interactive media; virtual communities; social networks enable larger, geographically dispersed communities Transitory organizations spontaneously assemble within a durable social infrastructure matrix. Ongoing meta-systematic re-negotiation of individual/subsociety/superstructure interfaces
Self Person fixed by unquestioned social role; no awareness of inside/outside distinction Self as unitary, rational individual, with an “inner life,” and an explicitly-defined relationship with society Age of anxiety: growing awareness of internal incoherence. Self defined by membership in one counterculture (and rejection of the other counterculture) Identity derives from subcultural allegiance. Integration of personality a receding ideal. Atomization of self due to always-on internet: massively more interruptions, entertainments, relationships, tasks Self explicitly accepted as fluid, nebulous assembly, inherently in dynamic interaction, with transient characteristics but no essential nature
Music Traditional forms; community production; no sense of authorship Self-conscious art music (“classical” in the broad sense). Cult of the composer Crisis in classical music; nihilistic atonality. Serialism. Jazz. Everyone in Boomer generation listens to all countercultural music, regardless of genre. In dualist counterculture, attempts at Christian alternative Punk as first mass subculture. Not intended as a universal alternative; explicitly nihilistic. Repeated fragmentation of genres into sub-sub-genres. Ludicrousness of genre leads to mash-ups. Run-DMC/Aerosmith “Walk this way” video collaboration as early explicit example. Genre as musical element, like melody and rhythm, to use and play with. Democratization of music production and distribution as computer tools (DAWs, Soundcloud) improve.
Sex and gender Unquestioned sex roles Sex roles reinforced by systematic ideologies First wave feminism Second-wave feminism in the monist counterculture. Moral Majority & “family values” in dualist counterculture Fragmentation of feminism: pro- vs. anti-sex, egalitarian vs. essentialist. LGBTQ, Quiverfull, men's movements, orthosexuality, Bears, PUA, NoFap, Rules Girls, furverts, … Intersectionalism. Jagged, incoherent, decontextualized political and ethical claims about sex and gender that have escaped from subcultures Whole-hearted ironism; recognition that there is no fair system and conflict is inevitable; passion & compassion together
Buddhism Miscellaneous practical superstitions; karma, merit, and auspiciousness; monastic economics. Entirely unknown to Consensus Buddhists. Scriptural Buddhist theorizing Buddhist modernism: importation of new, rationalizing foundations from West, as a response to cultural breakdown in Asia Consensus Buddhism: hybrid of Asian Buddhist modernism with American monist counterculture Diverse Western Buddhist subcultures, mainly developed by charismatic Asian modernizers. No serious attempt at universality. Spurious rhetoric of traditionalism (usually actually Asian nationalism). McMahan: “Global folk Buddhism.” Dharma burgers. Vapid @DalaiLama tweets. Fake Buddha quotes. McMindfulness. Eckhart Tolle. SBNR. Buddhism as amorphous assemblage of means for transformation of culture, society, and self by uniting spaciousness and passion to unclog energy and empower nobility
Vampires Considered a realistic physical danger Symbolize incoherence as challenge to the system (Church, Nation, and/or rationality) [Bram Stoker’s Dracula] Monstrous Other as Romantic anti-hero [Ann Rice; Dark Shadows] Monstrous Self as Romantic anti-hero [Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books] Monstrosity (incoherence) of the self as a practical hassle that can be managed [Kim Harrison] Trivialization of no-longer-threatening incoherence [Twilight as first attempt]. But fails until we have fully digested shadow Nobility of vampires as creative, benevolent appropriation of personal incoherence
Food Mythological food taboos; pre-systematic practices of hunting, gathering, growing, harvesting, cooking, sharing, and eating it Mainstream state/academic/industrial food ideologies: Domestic Science, Home Economics, Nutrition On-going; the mainstream is still strong in this domain, oddly enough Hippie health-food culture; macrobiotics; vegetarianism Subcultural food ideologies: proliferation of variants of vegetarianism (vegan, fruitarian, etc); Slow Food; locavorism; raw foodism; paleo; etc. Commercial diet fads; magic ingredient of the week; proliferation of decontextualized health/nutrion claims in food marketing; soylents ??? [Current paucity of knowledge makes future inconceivable]

In praise of choicelessness

Tantric Buddhist dancer

Tantric Buddhist religious dance image courtesy↗︎︎ Steve Evans

The choiceless mode of relating to meaningness↗︎︎ has no “becauses.” In the systematic mode, when you ask “why,” a system answers “because…”. The “becauses” hang together in ways that make everything make sense. In the choiceless, or pre-systematic mode, that’s not necessary—or even conceivable.

In the choiceless mode, you know of only one way of understanding meaningness. You are unaware of any alternatives. In fact, you are also unaware of your own understanding; of the possibility of alternatives; and of your lack of awareness.

In a choiceless culture, no one asks “why?” about meanings, and so there is no “because” needed to answer. Asking doesn’t occur to you. Meaning is a given: inherent in people and things. Water rats are tasty; there’s no point asking why. You marry your mother’s brother’s daughter; to marry your father’s brother’s daughter would be an abomination↗︎︎; you do not think to ask why.

In a choiceless society, you are defined by your social position. You are the son of so-and-so, and belong to the eagle clan—as your father, the clan chief, did. When he died, your elder brother wore the eagle clan hat at the wake. If your brother dies before you, you will wear the clan hat. Like all eagles, you are an enemy of the horse clan and allied to the bear clan. You knew from the age of five that you would marry your mother’s brother’s daughter. This is your self; this is who you are.

In a choiceless culture, art follows forms handed down through legitimate peripheral participation↗︎︎ plus some oral explanation. The forms are unquestioned; they are simply as they are. Making art (in the broad sense—music, stories, clothing) is a communal activity. There is no sense of authorship, or originality as a value.

All of this is just how it is; there is no “because” available.

Of course, pesky children and anthropologists do ask “why?”. If they are persistent, they’ll get some story that makes no sense. Answers in choiceless societies follow dream logic, not pragmatic logic. Typically they involve biologically-impossible sex acts, a flying buffalo-woman, or a talking snake in a magic fruit tree.

In choiceless cultures, meaningness is not a problem. You may have a problem, because you loathe the cousin you have to marry, but that’s just practical. It’s a fact you have to live with, like the permanent limp you got with an ankle broken when you were a kid. It does not occur to you to blame the system, because you have no concept of systems.

Meaning in choiceless societies seems timeless and changeless. Particular meanings can and do change, but within the culture this is noticed only as specific, local, contingent changes, rather than as a general dynamic. There is little sense of history; of change beyond that experienced during one’s life, and in one’s community.

Many social scientists use the word “traditional” to mean what I’m calling “choiceless.” However, “traditional” is also used to mean entirely other things,1 so I’ve invented the new term to avoid ambiguity.

A partial experience of choicelessness

Himalayan Tantric Buddhist temple

Image of Tantric Buddhist temple courtesy↗︎︎ Michael Reeve

The choiceless mode is the most natural one. Nearly all humans who have ever lived have only experienced meaning in the choiceless mode. Our brains co-evolved with choicelessness, and it feels right. All the other modes feel wrong. So Meaningness and Time is about why the other modes—despite all their genuine benefits—make us unhappy, and what to do about that.

Unfortunately, the choiceless mode depends on ignorance of alternatives. It’s usually impossible for nearly everyone in the developed world, and survives mostly only in remote areas in the most “backward” countries.

In 2003, I spent a month on pilgrimage in the Himalayan backcountry; one of the poorest and most remote places in the world. I went to practice my religion, Tantric Buddhism↗︎︎, with people for whom it is the normal way of life. In that, I was naive and mainly disappointed. As with notional Buddhists everywhere in Asia, few people were aware of even the most basic Buddhist doctrines or practices, and almost no one had Buddhist motivations.2

Yet my month there was probably the happiest of my life. What I found instead was a sane, optimistic, decent society, that felt right to me, and I believe also to most people in it. Presumably part of that rightness was religious commonality. A Catholic might feel something similar on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela↗︎︎. I don’t think that commonality was the main thing, though.

I would like to believe that Buddhism is a particularly good religion, and this was a good place with good people partly due to its Buddhist history—even if there is not much Buddhism now. At the time, I wrote:

Whatever their experience of religion, it seems to have a very salutary effect on their character. It has been remarked by visitors here for hundreds of years that they are exceptionally honest, hard-working, considerate, sensible, polite, reserved, hospitable and decent; it is hard to resist summing this up as “noble.”

I think, though, that the quasi-Buddhist content of the culture may have been less important than that it was a rare survival of the choiceless mode. The people had an intact social order, with ritual roles that everyone understood thoroughly and accepted without question.

Yesterday I took part in a procession (splendid costumes, trumpets and cymbals, deity and sword dance, fire offering) in which lots of old people were counting Guru Rinpoche mantra. So I pulled out my rosary and practiced mantra too. This got lots of amused looks (politely hidden, except in the case of small children). Norbu said today that he had overheard conversation and in fact everyone was excited and happy to see a white Buddhist; they had never seen one before. Maybe I should practice in public more often.

My own experience was one of choicelessness, too, or as much as I’ve ever had. At a literal, practical level, there were almost no decisions I could make. I knew only a few dozen words of the language, so I was dependent on the translator and organizer of the pilgrimage. Experientially, I was wide-open due to the combination of culture shock and intensive meditation practice:

Sometimes I find myself in an a situation that is clearly not me, with no explanation for how this could have happened, producing a sense of surreal dislocation. For example, a month ago I found myself working as an unpaid waiter in the restaurant attached to a Hindu temple in Malaysia, due presumably to some causal chain that I could not begin to reconstruct. My ability to laugh and ecstatically go with such situations (“I’ve no clue why how or why am I here, nor do I have the foggiest idea how to be a waiter in general, much less in a Malaysian Hindu temple restaurant, but I will do the absolute best job I can and enjoy it thoroughly, because why not”) seems to be the best measure of my health at the level of energy.

Here the most important religious practice in an individual’s life is the Annual Ritual. This is a house-and-family-blessing ritual. A crew of monks are hired to provide the requisite clangs, blaats, and hocus-pocus3 in the house’s shrine room (every house has one). While they are in there performing the ritual, the head of household participates in a small way. Mostly, however, the Annual Ritual is an excuse to invite all your friends and extended family over for some serious drinking (in the rest of the house). Exactly how this can be the most important religious practice in an individual’s life, I don’t understand, since the practice seems to be done by the monks almost exclusively. This is part of the general paradox that everyday life here is thoroughly infused with religious practice, and yet in a sense they don’t seem to practice at all. (They pay monks to do it for them.)

Anyway, yesterday I found myself inexplicably in the shrine room of a house undergoing Annual Ritual, helping the monks. Mostly they knew the liturgy by heart, which I didn’t, and there was no spare copy of the text, and in any case I can’t read Tibetan fast enough to keep up. So my participation was mostly restricted to throwing rice at appropriate moments, and joining in on the very occasional bits of liturgy I recognized (such as Guru Rinpoche mantra).

At the end of the pilgrimage, I concluded:

I’ve gained significant new insight into what makes me happy and miserable; and, relatedly, into the nature of my energy problem. Briefly, in managing a business, I learned to divide my energy finely, and to send out the fragments of my being to animate all the minute details of a complex enterprise—leaving as little as I possibly could within my own body. Over the years this became a habit, and one that has been difficult to unlearn. Here, I have been entirely cut off from “the world” and its complexities, into which I would habitually discharge my energy. I have instead been surrounded by natural beauty and by the sacred. Practicing perception and nowness, together with some specific energy methods, has drawn my energy back into my body, coherent and undivided. The challenge now will be to make that habitual even when dancing in the charnel ground↗︎︎ that is the Western world.

  • 1. In postmodernity, conservatives often use “traditional” to mean “modern,” i.e. the way things were until forty years ago. “Traditional” can also mean no more than “we did it that way last time.” As we’ll see, traditions are often back-dated by their inventors, to make them seem non-choices.
  • 2. Instead, they practiced “the worldly yana,” a religion of practical benefits.
  • 3. Clangs from cymbals, blaats from trumpets, and hocus pocus from religious texts read out loud.

The glory of systems

The Crystal Palace, 1851

The Crystal Palace↗︎︎, a triumphant showcase of systematicity, built 1851

The rise and fall of “because”

Western culture, society, and selves all fell apart forty years ago. Or so say many theorists; and I agree. To understand how we relate to meaning now, and how we could better relate in the future, we need to understand that recent past.

A systematic culture answers “why” questions with “becauses.” The answers are reasonably consistent and coherent. A series of “why” questions eventually reaches an ultimate↗︎︎, eternal Truth↗︎︎. This Truth is the foundation of the system, which supposedly answers all questions for everyone, everywhere, eternally.

Religious systems, government systems, economic systems, aesthetic systems, philosophical systems, scientific systems, family systems: until a few decades ago, these provided iron frameworks for meaning. Meanings were held safely in place, certified by reliable structures.

This was an extraordinary accomplishment. Systems are not normal or natural. Almost no one has had them in the hundreds of thousands of years humans have been around. Nearly everyone has had to make do without becauses. Human progress over the past few centuries can be attributed almost entirely to systems.

Then, “because” stopped working. We are back in a becauseless world—like and unlike that of our pre-systematic ancestors.

We have not yet figured out how to live well without becauses. Suggestions about how to do that are the goal of Meaningness and Time. First, though, I will explain how “because” worked, how it stopped working, and where that leaves us.

Disclaimers

  1. The history of the rise and fall of “because” is extremely interesting. However, it’s a standard academic topic that I have nothing new to say about. (My tale begins in the aftermath.) So this page presents just a brief summary, for readers who are unfamiliar with the backstory.

  2. The question of how systems arose, and how (and whether) they failed, is one of the most important and most debated among historians. A careful account, with caveats and footnotes, would be much longer. My version may be a “Just So Story↗︎︎,” or fanciful fable. I find it illuminates recent events, but you have every right to be skeptical.

  3. Historians often use the word “modern” to mean what I’m calling “systematic.” The “modern era” covers roughly the late 1400s until the late 1900s. However, “modern” has other meanings.1 To avoid confusion, I’ve chosen a non-standard word.

Why systematicity happens

A society builds a systematic culture when it becomes aware of alternatives. When your tribe meets another that thinks it’s not OK to marry cousins, like you do, the natural thing to do is to kill and eat those barbarians. In rare cases, this is impractical, and you are stuck with talking to them. They criticize your marriage system, which you didn’t even know you had, and theirs is horrifying. (Or dangerously appealing, if you don’t like the cousin you have to marry.) So now you need to come up with a justification, and stories about talking snakes with magic apples no longer cut it.

The European Renaissance is a key example.2 Global trade gradually made Western Europeans increasingly aware of alternative cultures: Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the Islamic world, and even China↗︎︎. A major push came with a wave of refugees from the Fall of Constantinople (1453), who brought with them the texts of Ancient Greece and Rome (which had been lost in the West), plus the culture of the Byzantine Empire, plus Persian and Arabic scholarship.

Interior of the Crystal Palace with Neoclassical decorations, 1851

Interior of the Crystal Palace with Neoclassical decorations, 1851

Europeans gradually recognized many of these foreign ideas as serious challenges, or even as right. Meaningness became a problem. How to resolve conflicts between meanings?

The Renaissance got a head start by discovering that the Ancient Greek philosophers had asked the same question, and had found plausible answers. The rest is well-known: the Protestant Reformation (which ended choiceless Christianity), the European Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, democracy, individual rights, and the general triumphal march of modernity.

Systematic society

Queen Victoria inaugurates the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, 1851

Queen Victoria inaugurates the Crystal Palace, 1851

A systematic society has a multitude of social roles—unlike a choiceless society, which has only a few.3 Each role is defined by a code of regulations, which are rationally derived from Ultimate Truth. Roles fit together into complex institutions—church, state, corporation, community—that accomplish society’s proper goals. Everything makes sense—everything has a “because”—so everyone knows what they are supposed to do. These systems together provide a stable, harmonious social order. Relationships among people, and between people and God, work as they should. (Or, at any rate, this is the theory.)

Systematicity makes possible the division of labor. This crucial social technology enabled the spectacular economic, artistic, technological, and intellectual advances of the systematic era. Despite all the attractions of the choiceless mode, no one actually wants to return to it if that means giving up the benefits of the systematic one.4

Systematic culture

The Crystal Palace, 1854

The Crystal Palace in 1854

Systematic culture provides the web of “becauses” that hold society and selves together. It explains why the way we do things is the right way.

Systematic culture is rational, in the original sense. “Ratio” is Latin for “reason,” both in the sense of “reasoning”—the thinking process—and “reasons”—meaning justifications. Systematic culture thinks out reasons for everything. Supposedly, these are based on unshakable foundations that can’t be argued against. The culture builds up, from there, a cathedral of consistent and coherent meanings and values, a vaulting architecture of columns and buttresses, beams and arches, principles and proofs; light and airy, yet firm enough to last till Judgement Day.

A systematic culture is reflective. It discusses itself, describes itself, judges itself, rationalizes itself. Systematic knowledge is abstract, explicit, codified, and universal. Whatever is good and true is good and true for all people everywhere, eternally↗︎︎. Systematic culture is learned in schools and from books more than by apprenticeship.

At the height of systematic culture, in the mid–1800s, religion, philosophy, politics, science, and all the arts were in agreement. Philosophy was not separate from theology, and atheism disqualified you as a philosophy professor. Religion was considered rational; it gave justifications consistent with common sense. Political and economic theory mainly justified the existing social order, drawing reasons from both religion and science. Science discovered the Will of God, as manifest in His Creation. Great art was, by definition, morally improving. Art expressed the highest values of the culture; it was pure, inspiring, and uplifting.

Or so went the official story. With hindsight, this may all sound ridiculous, and even repellent. We know that it failed conclusively a hundred years later. And there were, of course, prescient dissenters. But the internal contradictions in the systematic worldview were mainly invisible at the time, and it did work astonishingly well for several centuries.

The Crystal Palace↗︎︎, built in 1851, was a triumphant showcase of systematicity. An engineering and economic marvel, its elegant geometrical design also reflected the classical rationality of the time. At once it reflected the elegant symmetry and simplicity of Greek temples—great expressions of a previous systematic culture—and pointed to a glorious, literally En-lightened and up-lifted future.

The Palace was an enormous building with walls and roofs entirely of glass. Nothing like it had ever been seen. It was made possible by the invention of glass plate casting, just two years earlier, which was much cheaper and produced much higher-quality glass than earlier processes. The glass plates were assembled into modules, held in place with cast-iron beams. Standardization of the modules enabled mass production, a new systematic social technology. From design on paper to opening, it took only eight months to build the Palace, and its cost was a quarter that of a conventional building of the same size.

The Crystal Palace was built to hold The Great Exhibition↗︎︎. That was first World’s Fair: shows of culture and industry, art and commerce, that were major events for the next century. The Great Exhibition included displays of fine art from around the world and through the centuries; a concert hall; exhibits of all manner of manufactured goods such as cameras, jewelry, locks, guns, and musical instruments; cutting-edge technologies like telegraphs and microscopes; and entire working factories, such as a cotton mill that went from the raw material to finished cloth. It was a huge success.

Systematic self

John Calvin

John Calvin: a main contributor to the development of the systematic self

Living in a systematic society requires, and enables, a systematic self—quite different from a choiceless self.5

In the choiceless mode, you are defined by your relationships; mainly family ones. Being a daughter, mother, and cousin determines what you feel and do. The function of your self is balancing your personal impulses with the needs of others, according to those roles. Morality—being a good person—means maintaining harmony by conforming to collective clan decisions. The choiceless self belongs, and is embedded in a web of mutual caring.

This sort of self is incompatible with complex social institutions. Efficient, specialized work gives you obligations to strangers, on the basis of explicit rules, not felt needs. A self devoted to balancing needs based on relationships cannot make sense of systematic society. It can only experience impersonal obligations as unjust demands imposed by the powerful, for the gratification of their own desires, at the expense of everyone else. Such a self must violate these demands frequently, or (if subjugated) will feel constantly resentful.

To create a systematic self, you emerge from embeddedness, as an individual.6 An individual has relationships, where a choiceless self is relationships. For an individual, the obligations of a relationship are determined by impersonal, rational considerations, not by intensity of feelings.

Creating a systematic self involves hardening boundaries, so other people’s emotions don’t flood you and compel your actions. The subject/object boundary encloses a new inner world of private, reflective experience. Relationships themselves are brought inside, as objects you can consider rationally.

Where the choiceless self is a self, the systematic self has a self: it takes itself as an object in its inner world. The systematic self is able to reason about itself, in relation to others, according to roles, and can adjudicate their requirements dispassionately. For the systematic self, ethics—being a good person—means conforming to abstract systems of laws, rules, and institutions. It means conscientiousness: doing what you have explicitly agreed to do, regardless of how you and others feel about that. It means doing what is necessary to maintain the system and uphold its values.

At first this feels unnatural, but since you now have a self, you can act on your self. You become the administrator of your internal world. You can choose among competing desires systematically, instead of according to which yells louder. You can manipulate yourself into better behavior; into conformity with a systematic society. When successful, you reward yourself with self-esteem, which is abstract and purely internal, rather than with impulse-gratification.

All this is far more sophisticated than the choiceless self, whose inner world is just a chaos of emotions, which aren’t even particularly yours, most of the time.

A systematic self has an individual identity, which is not dependent on social roles. “Individual” literally means “not divided.” As chief of your inner world, you run the show. You have freedom of choice, rather than being torn between conflicting impulses and relationships. You experience yourself a single being, the same person in every circumstance, throughout your life.

A systematic self enables authorship, a mode of cultural creativity impossible in the choiceless world. You create as an individual, by manipulating objects in your private internal world, rather than by cooperatively manipulating external objects in the public world. The enormous flowering of culture that started in the Renaissance, and continued through the modern era, depends on such authorship.

Some historians trace the development of the systematic self to the Protestant Reformation, particularly to Calvinism.7 The Calvinist Reformers deliberately created a well-ordered society by disciplining the poor and demanding that even the aristocracy conform to strict religious morality. To make this possible, they developed new technologies of the self.

The Reformers extended to everyone spiritual practices that had been the preserve only of monks. They insisted that everyone examine the contents of their souls, and that everyone should discipline themselves based on what they found there. No longer could you be saved by passively attending church on Sunday. Every layman had to be his own confessor. Individual identity developed from this individual responsibility for salvation. The new, highly-regulated social order and the new, highly-regulated self were mutually supportive.

Eternalism simulates choicelessness

Systematicity is unnatural—and feels unnatural. Humans evolved in choiceless societies for hundreds of thousands of years. Systematicity began only a few thousand years ago, and it’s mostly only been significant for the past few hundred. Our brains are not adapted for it.8

Eternalism↗︎︎ tries to provide some of the comforts of the choiceless mode, within the systematic mode. Eternalism substitutes certainty for choicelessness. If we could be truly certain, we would not have the burden of choice. If everything about culture and social roles were definitely right, we could go back to taking it for granted, without having to reflect on it.

The choiceless mode feels timeless, because you have no awareness of historical change. Eternalism substitutes universality for timelessness; it insists that what is true, is true eternally. But can you believe that?

Unfortunately, certainty is a poor substitute for choicelessness. Certainty implies at least the possibility of doubt. It demands belief. In the choiceless mode, doubt is impossible, because belief is unnecessary. You simply do the things your role calls for.

Also, of course, nebulosity↗︎︎ is always obvious, so belief is impossible. The eternalist ploys—pretending, hope, faith, naiveté, and so on—never work for long.

The attraction of most contemporary spiritual systems—from fundamentalist Christianity to SBNR monism—is the implicit promise to return you to the choiceless mode. They lie, though. All they can offer is eternalism, not choicelessness.

  • 1. For instance, in ordinary usage, “modern” often just means “current.” In art criticism, it covers the late 1800s to about 1980—only a small part of the period called “modern” by most historians. That narrower usage of “modern”↗︎︎ corresponds to the period of “systems in crisis and breakdown” described next.
  • 2. Systematicity is a matter of degree, not all-or-nothing. The earliest urban societies↗︎︎ were already somewhat systematic five thousand years ago. Ancient India, China, Greece, and Rome were quite systematic at their peaks. Rome, especially, was astonishingly modern; it wasn’t until the 1600s, or perhaps even 1700s, that Europe caught up to where it had been a millennium and a half earlier. Rome’s modernity, and its success, was due to its cosmopolitanism: its willingness to adopt and adapt the life-ways of other cultures.
  • 3. On the other hand, in a systematic society, each person has only a handful of roles; whereas in post-systematic societies, we all have so many we can’t keep track of them.
  • 4. When I travelled in Asia, everywhere I went, I asked people “would you rather live here or in Singapore?” Everyone said “I love it here—I would miss the food, my family, the pace of life—but yeah, I’d rather live in Singapore where I could own a big TV.”
  • 5. My explanation here draws on Robert Kegan’s model↗︎︎ of psychological development. My “choiceless self” corresponds to his “interpersonal self”, and my “systematic self” to his “institutional self”. These are stages 3 and 4 of his 5-stage schema. “Fluidity” is meant to correspond to his stage 5.
  • 6. According to Kegan, Americans in the 1970s typically created an “institutional self” when they left home for college, full-time work, or the military. Primary membership in an institution outside the family is a natural impetus. I’ve put “created” in the past tense, because—as I will explain in upcoming pages—I suspect it is no longer possible to create a systematic self in the way it was then.
  • 7. For instance Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age↗︎︎. Other systematic societies developed similar self-technologies, presumably for the same reasons.
  • 8. An interesting question is to what extent systematicity and brains have co-evolved recently. The cultural evolution of systematicity may exert strong, novel selective pressures, which may affect genetic evolution of brains. Conversely, as innate brain capacities have changed under this pressure, increasingly sophisticated and effective forms of systematicity may become feasible, driving social and cultural evolution.

Invented traditions and timeworn futures

Cranberry sauce. Yuck!

Most new ideas are wrong. Most new ways of doing things don’t work. Rationality and science can help sort helpful innovations from harmful or useless ones. However, for nearly all the time humans evolved, those were unavailable.

For our ancestors, it was nearly always a good idea to reject any cultural change. Even now, “we have always done it that way” is often a good reason to continue.1 For this reason, our brains tend to conservatism.

For innovators, the popular preference for tradition is an obstacle. A common, effective strategy is to give the impression that the innovation is not new, but traditional. That hides its risks, costs, or defects, and makes it seem comfortingly safe and acceptable. Historians call this ploy “the invention of tradition,” a phrase introduced in an excellent book by that name↗︎︎.

Of course, every tradition was once an invention. That is not “invention of tradition.” “Invention” here means deliberate deception. It is the presentation of something new as though it were ancient. This may involve explicit falsification of history, or just misleading association of the innovation with symbols of tradition.

Genuine, dramatic progress is also attractive, but hard to come by. Advocates of ideas or practices that have long been marginal—because they don’t actually work well—can dress them up as visionary breakthroughs that will revolutionize everything. For a while, this may bring popular attention and acceptance. This is the mirror image of an invented tradition.

So far as I know, historians haven’t discussed this ploy, and there is no standard term for it.2 So, provisionally, I’m calling these “timeworn futures.”

I’ll discuss some entertaining examples of invented traditions and timeworn futures later in this page. (Including horse-drawn carriages, kilts, and cranberry sauce.) But first: how is this relevant to Meaningness?

Legitimizing systems

↗︎︎

Given the serious defects of the systematic mode of understanding meaningness, it is remarkable how successful it was, for how long.

Invented traditions and timeworn futures were key strategies for overcoming psychological resistance to systematicity. For example, the radical new Protestant doctrines were “traditional Christianity, as practiced by the Early Church” (in contrast to the supposed illegitimate innovations of Catholicism). The radical new ethical demands of modern life were “traditional morality.” The radically new bureaucratic state was “the glorious tradition of our nation.” All these descriptions tried to make systematic mode innovations feel choiceless.

Simultaneously, each splinter Protestant sect had a fabulous “new vision” for Godly society; outmoded ethical claims were “spreading rapidly from decent modern people to benighted foreigners and our own lower classes”; and archaic state institutions were “essential foundations for national progress.”

Even after the systematic worldview has collapsed overall, falsifications of both types are still frequently used to justify particular systems.

Invented traditions and timeworn futures are harmful when they justify systems that are worse than alternatives. Arguably, they are benign if they justify systems that are better than alternatives, but which may be rejected for bad reasons. Even then, the deception is dubious.

The countercultures, fabricating pasts and futures

Rave at Stonehenge

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Andrew Dunn

As the mainstream collapsed, the 1960s–80s countercultures proposed alternative systems. These soon failed, unsurprisingly, because they didn’t have much new to offer.

Both countercultures relied heavily on invented traditions and timeworn futures. However, the dualist counterculture relied particularly heavily on invented traditions, and the monist one on timeworn futures.

The dualist counterculture advocated “restoring traditional American values,” but the glorious past it extolled had never existed. If the movement had succeeded, it would have created a future unlike anything in history. The monist counterculture proclaimed the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” but this timeworn future was straight out of early–1800s German Romantic Idealism.

Each counterculture used the other strategy as well, though. Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” The New Age justified epic silliness with invented roots in Ancient Egypt, Atlantis, Native American wisdom, Eastern Religions, Mayan prophesies, or just about any time, place, and culture other than 1800s Europe—because Romantic Idealism was thoroughly discredited.

Buddhism: 2000 years of invented traditions

Reading the history of Buddhism, I gradually realized most of its heroes and events were make-believe. Rin’dzin Pamo↗︎︎ recognized The Invention of Tradition↗︎︎ would explain the motivations of the inventors, and gave me a copy.

I wrote about a narrow aspect of this↗︎︎ back in 2009. A couple years later, I discovered David L. McMahan’s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism↗︎︎, about the invention of “Buddhism” in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’ve written many↗︎︎ blog↗︎︎ posts↗︎︎ about↗︎︎ that↗︎︎, and↗︎︎ plan↗︎︎ to↗︎︎ address Buddhist invented traditions more generally soon.

Meanwhile, the Buddhism invented in the 1970s↗︎︎ as a synthesis of vintage–1900 Asian modernist Buddhism with the American monist counterculture is still presented↗︎︎ as a cutting-edge new path. Since the weakness↗︎︎ and defects↗︎︎ of that system have been clear for twenty years, this is a fine example of a timeworn future.

How to defend against ideological time-distortions

The only defense against invented traditions and timeworn futures is to study the history of ideas.

This book is partly an attempt to catalog the building-blocks of meaning and help you recognize them. There are surprisingly few genuinely different ideas about meaningness. Timeworn futures just repackage a few, wrapped in shiny up-to-date branding. Invented traditions try to hide something new amidst the familiar, wrapped in reassuringly retro branding.

The final chapter of The Invention of Tradition↗︎︎ is titled “Mass-producing Traditions: 1870–1914.” That, plus discovering that Buddhism-as-we-know-it was invented then, made me realize how much of contemporary ideology dates from the period. The era achieved a brilliant, seemingly harmonious synthesis of Protestantism, scientific rationalism, nationalism, industrial capitalism, and Romantic expressivism. It took extraordinary ideological innovations to paper-over contradictions among these—including extensive time-distortions.

I had neglected Victorian ideology as irrelevant: stiff and dull and forgotten by all. But, the story of meaningness since then is mainly just an account of that architecture disintegrating. To make sense of the wreckage we live among, we have to look at historical images of the palace at its peak.

Forthright mythologization in the fluid mode

It is almost impossible to imagine alternatives to one’s own culture from within. You need to expose yourself to a source of contradiction; of otherness. With the world tending to a global monoculture, pasts are among the few resources we have for innovating futures.

Pasts also have great romantic and aesthetic appeal, so they are effective for communicating and inspiring futures. That is one reason invented traditions work. It is the duplicity of invented traditions that is the main problem, not their creation as such.

I will suggest that non-deceptive creative mythologization, based on an archaeology of meaningness, may be a valuable method in the fluid mode. Myths are sacred fictions we tell about the past to make sense of meaningness in the present, and to point toward futures we hope for (or hope to avoid). Now that we no longer live in the systematic mode, we have no reason to pretend that the myths we make are “true.” We have no compulsion to tell stories that are entirely coherent and well-founded—because we’ve learned that is impossible.

My romantic fantasy novel↗︎︎, set in India in 700, tries to create an inspiring mythology. It mixes genuine history, contemporary values, and—implicitly—ideas about a future I would like to see.

British royal ritual: an invented history, with motivations

Scene from the Coronation of King Edward and Queen Alexandra

The Invention of Tradition↗︎︎ analyzes many examples, which are fascinating and often funny. Most in the book concern the falsification of the traditions of the British kingdoms for nationalist purposes. I’ll describe one of these in some depth, and then a variety of other invented traditions briefly.

The picture above is from the Coronation of King Edward and Queen Alexandra, apparently around the year 1275. The style is Pre-Raphaelite↗︎︎, a genre of painting from the mid–1800s that emphasized Romantic fantasy themes. Pre-Raphaelite paintings usually feature gorgeous noblewomen in long flowing pseudo-Medieval robes, gothic architecture, and a wizard or king plus maybe a dragon.3

Britain is, of course, famous for its royal pomp and circumstance; no country does elaborate state occasions better. That is due to its unbroken tradition of royal ritual, going back to Medieval times, as in the picture above.

Not. The Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra↗︎︎ was held in 1902. The “tradition” of British royal ritual had mostly been invented over the previous fifteen years, and the Coronation was mainly new. It was, however, elaborately fake-Medieval. It looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting—a fantasy of Medieval royal life—because it was imitating a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy.

(The central figure in the background appears to be Merlin, although I suppose he was actually some sort of Anglican Church functionary. Sadly, dragons were already extinct in Britain, so they were not invited.)

Of course, Britain had had genuine royal ritual, presumably for as long as it had had royalty. The point of a coronation ceremony is to get together everyone important to publicly agree that the new king is legitimate and unopposed. This is important because new kings are always opposed, and frequently illegitimate (relative to whatever standard of legitimacy is current). A successful coronation demonstrates that the king has enough power to force everyone to pretend, at least. It sows distrust among the opposition (who have all seen each other giving fealty to the king—so who is to say where anyone’s real loyalty lies?). It also affirms the mutual dependence of the Church and crown, and God’s mandate for rule. If well-executed, coronation works psychological magic (as ritual does), inspiring awe, loyalty, and gratitude in the kingdom’s subjects.

However, for several centuries, Parliament had gradually increased its powers at the expense of kings, with the balance shifting by the late 1600s. Moreover, the British kings from then up to Queen Victoria, who was crowned in 1837, were uniformly defective and unpopular, yet still able to interfere strongly in government.

When Victoria came to the throne, at the age of 18, she was already popular, and a potential threat to Parliamentary power. Parliament therefore engineered a minimal coronation that was both low-key and probably deliberately “shambolic” (as it is often described). This was perhaps the low point of British royal ritual. Nevertheless, Victoria and her husband Prince Albert were popular constitutional monarchs, and exerted considerable political power behind the scenes.

In 1887, Parliament reinvented royal ritual for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee↗︎︎, notionally a celebration of her fiftieth year on the throne. This was royal ritual with an entirely new function. It was not, in reality, to confirm the legitimacy of the Queen. Rather, the Jubilee confirmed the legitimacy of new British establishment: Parliament itself, the Anglican Church, industrial capitalism, and the colonial Empire.

The new establishment’s legitimacy was indeed in question, threatened not by the throne, but by even newer forces. At home, populist movements, including socialism, were rapidly gaining support. Abroad, the moral basis for the Empire, and its political and military feasibility, were increasingly dubious.

The Golden Jubilee, and even more the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, were enormous pageants of made-up ceremony, designed to give the impression that the new British establishment was continuous with ancient tradition. Now the aged, ailing, widowed, withdrawn, depressed and drug-addled Queen could be used as a symbol of that continuity, with no risk of any actual continuity of the throne as a power base. Populists were often republican, in favor of abolishing the royalty and House of Lords. So, the Jubilees were meant to create new popularity for the Queen, and by extension the Lords and the rest of the establishment that she notionally headed. They were highly successful.

The Jubilees were not just—or even mainly—British affairs. The Diamond Jubilee↗︎︎ was a lavish “Festival of the British Empire” designed by the Colonial Secretary. Parliament had declared Victoria Empress of India↗︎︎, a newly-invented title, in 1876. That was the pretext for making the Jubilee into a ceremony in which all the colonies gave homage to, in effect, their actual rulers—the British establishment. Ritual festivities were held not only in Britain itself, but throughout the Empire.

Victoria died in 1902, and was succeeded by her son Edward VII—whose Coronation with his wife Queen Alexandra is depicted at the head of this section.4 That grand event was modeled on the Jubilees. Its fake Medievalism suggested eternal stability of British institutions at a time when, in reality, they were changing rapidly.

British royal ritual is now a genuine tradition, having endured for a little more than a century. Here’s a scene from the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, featuring the carriage made for Edward VII’s 1902 Coronation↗︎︎.

Royal Carriage at Wedding of Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton

That carriage was an invented tradition in 1902; the aristocracy had already abandoned carriages for motorcars, so new ones had to be built for the occasion. Pseudo-Medieval carriages are an authentic tradition now. The most recent one↗︎︎ features electric windows, heating, hydraulic stabilizers, and built-in digital copies of important British historical documents. Just in case you need to check the Magna Carta, while being dragged along by six horses, to see how your royal powers are constitutionally limited.

In fact, I suspect that the over-the-top Romantic Medievalism of the 1902 Coronation was partly to underline that the royalty were an absurd archaism, retained only for symbolic value—lest the new king get any ideas.

Tartan and kilt

Scottish national dress

A chapter of The Invention of Tradition↗︎︎ concerns the invention of Scottish history, culture, and nationality. It was expanded into a a full book↗︎︎, summarized here↗︎︎. Two striking facts concern the invention of the kilt, and of clan tartans, by English businessmen.

Tartan and kilt, those universal badges of Scottishness, are about as authentic as Disneyland. The kilt was invented by an Englishman, Thomas Rawlinson, who came to Scotland in the 1720s to manage an ironworks in the Highlands. Rawlinson observed that while the actual native costume of the Highlanders—a long belted cloak—might have been suitable for rambling over hills and bogs, it was "a cumbrous, inconvenient habit" for men working at a furnace. So he hired the tailor of the local army regiment to make something more "handy and convenient for his workmen" by separating the skirt from the rest and converting into a distinct garment.

Clan tartans were invented in the early 1800s by an English textile manufacturer, William Wilson, as a way of expanding the market for his products. Tartans were already common in Scotland, but variations in pattern were regional. It appears to have been Wilson who had the idea that each clan should have its own pattern.

Royal decree imposed unique tartans on the clans in 1822, when George IV visited Scotland↗︎︎. Sir Walter Scott↗︎︎ staged elaborate state pageantry for the king. He invented numerous ancient national traditions for the occasion, deliberately creating the first unified Scottish national identity↗︎︎.

Meanwhile, in America

Thanksgiving is an entirely invented tradition. Its mythology has accreted gradually, but mainly dates to the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. One aspect I find particularly amusing:

It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is inedible without it.
—Alistair Cooke

This is, of course, because it was served at the First Thanksgiving in 1621. No one actually likes the stuff. (We know this, despite claims to the contrary, because no one eats it except at Thanksgiving.5) However, it’s traditional, so one has to pretend.

But actually, there’s no evidence that it was served in 1621. And, the “tradition” was unknown until the 1940s, when it was invented by Ocean Spray, the marketing arm of the cranberry industry. An advertising campaign showed “traditional” Thanksgiving dinners, prominently featuring cranberry sauce. That dramatically increased demand for an agricultural product that is nearly inedible—intensely sour, bitter, fibrous, and otherwise almost tasteless.

And then there’s Christmas.

↗︎︎

“An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice”—xkcd↗︎︎

  • 1. Some readers will balk at this, because it is often also used to justify the unjustifiable. I find Chesterton’s parable of the fence↗︎︎ helpful as insight into why maintaining traditions is useful as a default.
  • 2. If you know of a discussion in the academic literature, or an accepted term, I’d love to hear about it.
  • 3. They are ridiculous but I love them.
  • 4. The king doesn’t appear in the picture. It shows the anointing of the queen. “Anointing” means that a shamanic medicine-man smeared sacred gloop on her. Quite what magic that was meant to accomplish, it’s hard to guess. We know, though, that seemingly-senseless rituals of supposedly “primitive” peoples—whether contemporary hunter-gatherers or ancient tribes such as the Victorians—express profound ineffable wisdom, due to their connectedness to the cycles of Nature and openness to the mysteries of Being.
  • 5. My girlfriend claims to like it, and to have eaten it once outside of Thanksgiving. And she is not even American. So, “hardly anyone.”

Systems of meaning all in flames

The Crystal Palace burning down, 1936

The Crystal Palace↗︎︎ burning down, 1936

The first half of the twentieth century was awful. Not just materially; Western systems of meaning—social, cultural, and psychological—were falling apart. The glorious accomplishments of the systematic era could not hold civilization together, and seemed likely to be lost entirely in a global conflagration.

Many people even came to think those systems were the cause of all the catastrophes. We who live in the aftermath—we who have never experienced an intact system—we cannot fully appreciate how awful that loss of meaning felt.

This page analyzes the first phase of meaning’s disintegration, roughly 1914–1964. It should help explain the new positive alternatives offered by the countercultures and subcultures, which came next, and also why those failed.

All the events I recount will be familiar, but the way I relate them to my central themes of eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎, and to problems of meaning in the domains of society, culture, and self, may seem novel.

We still have no adequate response to these issues. Any future approach—such as fluidity—must grapple with problems that first became obvious in the early twentieth century.

Society in crisis

Lenin addressing a crowd, 1920

Lenin addressing a crowd, 1920

The period was marked by two social crises: class conflict and world wars. The systematic ideologies that were supposed to resolve these horrible problems seemed, by the end, to have made them worse, or even to have been their principal causes.

Greatly increased division of labor during the 1800s created numerous specialized occupations. This drove great advances in the standard of living and enabled increasing cultural sophistication. However, it also created psychological alienation (discussed below) and social conflicts. The existing social system, which had been stable for hundreds of years, functioned only in an agrarian economy of peasants, aristocratic landowners, and a small class of skilled craftspeople. It had no way of accommodating the newly created classes, such as urban industrial workers and entrepreneurial commoners—who sometimes became richer and more powerful than most aristocrats.

Theorists proposed new systems of social organization: nationalist, socialist, democratic, totalitarian. Advocates made supposedly-rational arguments for why each was right; yet supporters mostly just chose the system that might benefit their in-group against others. Conflicts between them tore societies apart, often even into civil war.

Different countries tried each of the new systems, and all produced vast disasters:

  • nationalism led to World War I;
  • capitalism caused the world-wide Great Depression;1
  • fascism was to blame for World War II;
  • communism killed tens of millions with engineered famines and the mass murder of supposed dissidents.

WWI marked the end of naive faith in the systematic mode. Most countries went into the war confident of quick victory, confident of its necessity and ethical rightness, confident that war was an opportunity for glory, heroism, and unity. God was on our side.

For Europe, it was the first industrial war↗︎︎,2 with the new social and mechanical technologies of mass production turning out deaths instead of automobiles. Four years later, after tens of millions of casualties, extraordinary horror and suffering, the traumatized survivors asked not “was it worth it” but “what was that all about, anyway?”

In retrospect, WWI seemed completely pointless. Or, if it had any meaning, it was to point out that the pre-war systems of meaning must have been disastrously wrong. The 1800s had seemed an era of rapid moral progress as well as economic and scientific progress. That was no longer credible. This disillusionment increased support for alternatives, including socialist internationalism, fascism, explicit anti-modernism, and explicit nihilism.

One pointless, catastrophic world war might be a tragic accident. To fight another, even worse one—the worst human-created disaster ever↗︎︎—just twenty years later, goes beyond carelessness. When the victors of WWII immediately began preparing to fight WWIII among themselves—this time with potentially billions of deaths from nuclear weapons—it was widely regarded as a bad idea. Yet Cold War belligerents on both sides felt justified by their systems of meaning: benevolent socialist internationalism versus benevolent liberal democracy.

Systematicity itself was a major cause of the catastrophe. Leaders and peoples took their rational ideologies far too seriously, and acted on flawed theoretical prescriptions.

Why did they choose not to see the systems were failing? Eternalism↗︎︎. The only alternative to blind faith in the system seemed to be nihilism↗︎︎.

From the standpoint of each ideology, the others looked nihilistic:

  • For democratic capitalism, communism and fascism looked nihilistic in denying civil and human rights and the ultimate value of the individual.
  • For communism, capitalism and fascism denied the ultimate value of solidarity—the brotherhood of all—and the economic rights of the working class.
  • For fascism, the economic focus of communism and capitalism denied all values other than material ones. They denied the ultimate value of nation-state-ethnicity. They subordinated the noble, high culture of the elite to the vulgar, degenerate culture of the rabble.

Any relaxing of the defense of the system could only lead to the nihilist apocalypse↗︎︎. And, indeed, many thought the World Wars were the nihilist apocalypse—although in reality they were caused far more by eternalism than nihilism. On the other hand, a few thinkers started to suspect that it was systems as such that had been the problem. Among these were forerunners of the countercultures, such as the existentialists and Beats.3

Culture in crisis

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Art falling apart.
Marcel Duchamp↗︎︎, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2↗︎︎, 1912
(a/k/a “Explosion in the tile factory↗︎︎”)

While the systematic mode worked—up to WWI—the role of “high” culture was to express and reinforce the values of the system. Great art was, by definition, morally improving. The arts tried to be pure, inspiring, and uplifting. They provided an idealized vision of the smooth workings of meaning as it was meant to be.

High culture expressed the sacred eternal values of the elites—the “bourgeoise”—who were its patrons. Popular culture sometimes ignored or mocked elite values; but that was ephemeral rubbish.

Starting in the late 1800s, and accelerating after WWI, artists flipped all that on its head. High art began instead to expose the cracks in the system. It articulated the widely-felt sense of disintegration, of loss of certainty. It spoke to the anxiety, confusion, and even horror that came from the failure of all foundations; but also the freedom and joy that came with liberation from eternalism.4

Artists, in all media, systematically rejected past artistic systems, and the rational structures that justified them.5 Painters rejected geometrical perspective, the great achievement of Renaissance art. Composers rejected tonality↗︎︎, which had been the foundation of music for several centuries, and experimented with severe dissonances. Writers abandoned grammar, punctuation, prosody, sense↗︎︎, and all other “restrictive” forms.

At the extreme, the arts became entirely anti-sense, incoherent, or explicitly nihilistic. (This anticipates the incoherence of the atomized mode most of a century later.) Artists hurled globs of paint↗︎︎ at a canvas; composers arranged notes by rolling dice↗︎︎; writers cut individual words out of a book, shook them up, pulled ones out at random and called the result↗︎︎ a poem. Beyond even this random art↗︎︎ was anti-art↗︎︎—seeming to be outright nihilism. An empty picture frame declared to be a painting; John Cage’s four minutes and 33 seconds of silence↗︎︎ declared to be music; a blank page, a poem. Tristan Tzara↗︎︎, a key theorist, wrote “I am against systems; the most acceptable system is on principle to have none” and “logic is always false.”

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Is this art? How can you tell?
(Marcel Duchamp, Fountain↗︎︎, 1917)

High art also increasingly rejected all existing social systems. Biting the hands that fed it, it adopted the attitude épater la bourgeoisie↗︎︎: scandalize polite society!

The new job of art was not to uplift, but to overthrow. Eventually, you could not be a serious artist unless you constantly proclaimed your contempt and hatred for the middle and upper classes, for capitalism, for Victorian morality, for religion, for any sort of taboo or restriction. To be an artist was by definition to be a revolutionary. Simply maintaining an oppositional attitude became sufficient; art and social critique became inseparable.

Popular and high art now changed places. The middle and working classes had growing spending power, and entrepreneurs discovered that popular culture could be profitable. Commercial culture came to represent the “traditional values” of the systematic mode, where high art—the avant-garde↗︎︎—satirized and undermined them. Theorists proclaimed that all popular art was just kitsch—the cultural expression of eternalism↗︎︎.

Here began the “culture war,” which became particularly important in the countercultural mode.

The self in crisis

Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times↗︎︎, 1936

Systematic society required, and made partially possible, systematic selves. Systematic persons were rational individuals who conformed to, and enforced, systematic social values. This advance began breaking down in the first half of the twentieth century, due to systematicity’s harmful side-effects. Its requirements came to seem oppressive, meaningless, and for some, impossible. Selves fractured and broke under the stress.

Work in the industrial economy felt dehumanizing. Extreme division of labor made most people tiny, interchangeable cogs in a vast, incomprehensible, relentless machine. The functioning of the economy as a whole became opaque, so it was impossible to see the meaning of one’s own work, and the system’s demands seemed senseless. And, indeed, working conditions often were not only awful, but pointlessly awful.

Urban, industrial social organization increasingly alienated people from each other and from nature. The systematic self—based on a rigorous self/other boundary—made this worse, and even separated people from their own everyday experience. It became possible, for the first time, to feel lonely and isolated while in a crowd.

The mid–1800s introduced a new “Victorian” sexual morality and a new culture of the family. These addressed genuine social problems with some success. In the absence of reliable contraceptive technology, and limited food production, sexual restraint lessened the rate at which children died of starvation. The new concept of a private home life developed partly as refuge from the stresses of the work world, and was closely analogous to the new enclosed interiority of the systematic self.

However, these innovations also caused stress and misery for many people. For example, England had large, persistent surpluses of women, making it mathematically impossible for all to conform to the demand that they marry. Many people (men and women, adults and children) found the regimented ideology of duty-filled family relationships an onerous grind at best, and in some cases intolerable. Yet they were nearly inescapable. The newly private nuclear family could also conceal pathology and abuse that earlier, more open extended families might have successfully intervened in.

Increasing social complexity requires you to act as several different people in different places. Some of those partial-selves are false fronts; others may seem natural. If your personality is quite different at work and at home, which is the real you?

Ecstasy is the natural antidote to the sense that administering the systematic self—holding everything together—is exhausting. Choiceless cultures periodically celebrate with joyful non-ordinary states of consciousness, produced by community ritual, intoxicants, and relaxation of social role norms. Systematic cultures deliberately banned these as threats.6 Even this temporary escape route was cut off.

Many people began to ask: Why? For what? Given the rigidities of the system, even the best possible life outcomes would be quite unsatisfactory for most people. The restrictions seemed arbitrary, unnecessary, and unfair. When you ask “why?”, a system is supposed to always have an answer; but as the twentieth century staggered from crisis to catastrophe to breakdown, religious and political platitudes no longer seemed adequate. Rationalist certainty had also collapsed. Justifications based on abstraction and generality are sterile; when the systems they support are visibly failing, they come to seem meaningless.

In the anxiety of relativism↗︎︎, as eternalism disintegrates, one doubts everything. Yet the system has to reject doubters. They are criminal, mad, degenerate, lazy, undesirable; and punished or cast out accordingly. What then? Perhaps I am mad? Or a criminal? Perhaps “good” and “evil” no longer have any meaning? Perhaps meaning itself is impossible…

And so there developed new words for problems of the self, reflecting the new possibility of nihilism:

  • Alienation, in the mismatch between social roles and internal experience
  • Anomie↗︎︎, the feeling that social norms have broken down and become irrelevant
  • Neurosis, theorized to be caused by failure to adapt to stifling social requirements
  • Identity crisis, the feeling of loss of any meaningful self
  • Existential angst↗︎︎, the feeling accompanying nihilistic doubt

Many people adapted easily enough to systematic requirements, and constructed reasonably functional systematic selves. Others found it difficult, and were miserable; some failed altogether.7 In breakdown, the self is experienced as fragmented, incoherent, and hostile to itself.

Freud

Freud’s enormous influence during the first half of the twentieth century was due to his pioneering explanations—however incomplete and incorrect—of these problems.

A fully systematic self, he argued, is biologically impossible. The ideal of the self as the rational chief of a smoothly functioning internal bureaucracy is unrealizable. Not only is the self not an in-dividual, it is always actually divided. Most of what happens inside ourselves we cannot even know about: it is unconscious. The ego—what we most think of as self—is a hapless clown, caught between vastly more powerful forces.

The monstrous, irrational, amoral, chaotic id mainly does as it pleases; then the tyrannical, persecutory superego punishes us for desires and acts beyond our control, inducing constant anxiety and guilt. The ego’s mechanisms of defense against them, such as repression, denial, regression, and projection, are themselves mainly violent failures of rational self-management. They mirror the mechanisms of social oppression.

Civilization and Its Discontents↗︎︎ (1930), perhaps Freud’s most influential work, argued that because the conflict between social demands and individual desires was unavoidable, deep dissatisfaction was inescapable. The best we can hope for is to “replace neurotic misery with common unhappiness.”

Despite this profoundly gloomy conclusion, psychoanalysis functioned as a para-religion for millions of people. As a system for making sense of meaning in all its dimensions, it often fit lived experience better than Christianity.

During the middle of the century, psychoanalysis evolved away from orthodox Freudianism, in several productive directions. Object-relations theory recognized that relationships had great human value↗︎︎, not just instrumentally but intrinsically. It also developed more sophisticated and accurate understandings of the internal structure of the self and its fragmentation↗︎︎. Psychoanalysis also hybridized with existentialism, arguably deepening each. Both hybridized with Marxism, producing trenchant new analyses of the failures of the systematic mode, and suggesting new revolutionary possibilities. These were a major impetus for the 1960s–70s counterculture.

Responses: totalitarianism and existentialism

The main alternative, while all systems were failing, appeared to be nihilism—the end of meaning. However, two other responses developed during 1914–64: totalitarianism and existentialism.

These had some of the characteristics of countercultures, as I’ll define them on the next page. Both proposed alternatives to the failing mainstream, and were often anti-rational.8 Each contributed to counterculturalism: existentialism especially influenced the monist counterculture, and totalitarianism the dualist counterculture.

Totalitarianism

By “totalitarianism” I mean attempts to make a system work by force. (This is not quite the standard definition, but it’s close.) This includes fascism, actually-existing communism,9 and theocractic fundamentalism.

Totalitarianism is now mostly discredited in the West, so it’s important to understand why it made sense in the mid-twentieth century—and why it still makes sense to billions of people elsewhere.

Any serious system has a network of justifications that answer all “why” questions—not perfectly, but well enough for most people most of the time. So it ought to work. Moreover, systems mostly did work, for several centuries. Even in the 1950s, many liberal Western economists and political scientists considered that the Soviet bloc had an unfair advantage, because its leaders could simply order everyone to do what had to be done. They favored democratic institutions on ethical grounds, but believed that communism was more efficient economically—so the West might be doomed. (It wasn’t until the 2000s that the reasons non-systematic economies outperform started to be commonly understood.)

Like all eternalism, totalitarianism is based on the fantasy of control; it promises salvation if you conform to the dictates of the system. That promise is enormously appealing, and explains why Hitler, Stalin, and Mao had broad popular support—and why Islamic fundamentalism has broad popular support now.

The totalitarian intuition is that society would work if everyone just did what they were supposed to. And this is largely correct. Despite nearly opposite ideologies, Norway and Singapore are now among the highest-functioning countries in the world, because there is a general agreement among their citizens to do the right thing. In low-functioning countries, there is a de facto agreement to ignore pro-social norms in favor of personal or clan advancement. So why not just make everyone behave?

Totalitarianism’s flaws become apparent when it collides with nebulosity↗︎︎. It then uses all the eternalist ploys to maintain allegiance in the face of failure. Most obviously, totalitarianism is armed and armored to restore order by force. This requires purification, eventually by killing everyone who impedes the operation of the system (kulaks, Jews, apostates, profiteers, perverts, oppressors, idolators, elitists, degenerates, running-dog capitalist-roaders, intellectuals, counter-revolutionaries, etc.). Totalitarian leadership is typically addicted to magical thinking and pretending to believe. For the masses, they encourage thought suppression and kitsch.

Speaking of kitsch, all totalitarian movements see it as job one to suppress and destroy avant-garde art.10 Avant-garde art points to nebulosity and mocks systematicity—as such, not just specific systems. The Soviets declared it “counter-revolutionary,” and made “socialist realism” the only legal style. (That was state-worshipping propaganda kitsch in a style crudely imitating late–1800s Academic painting.) The Nazis declared the avant-garde “degenerate↗︎︎,” “nonsensical,” and “Jewish,” and banned it in favor of their own Classically-inspired propaganda kitsch. Nowadays, fundamentalists preach against it, ban it where they can, and promote religious kitsch.

In the social realm, I mentioned two problems: class conflict and world war. Totalitarianism deals with the first by banning it. (That was easy, wasn’t it? If you kill everyone responsible for class conflict, it will just go away.) Totalitarians love world wars—eternalism deludes them that they are fated to win and establish a global Soviet / Reich / Caliphate11—so that’s not a problem either.

Totalitarianism requires a self that is systematic but transparent. Choiceless selves—embedded in local community relationships—cannot conform to the will of a national or global system. Individuals—who have a private mental realm—may choose to resist the system, or hide dissenting thoughts from the system. The totalitarian self must be submerged in the State, or surrendered to God, renouncing personal boundaries. That is attractive, for many people, by relieving them of the burdens of choice. (Eternalism simulates choicelessness.) However, complete surrender is impossible to accomplish, which is one reason totalitarianism has not been more successful.

Existentialism

Existentialism rejected all systems of meaning in favor of choosing personal meanings. I’ve analyzed that extensively earlier in the book,12 so here I’ll say only a little.

Systematic eternalism tries to make meaning objective. During the twentieth century, this became obviously unworkable. Many saw nihilism as the only possible alternative, but (rightly) considered it unacceptable. Existentialists tried to create a third possibility: that meaning could be subjective rather than objective. In fact, they said, “authentic” meaning had to be subjective: a purely individual choice or creation, without any justification. They claimed that perfect internal freedom of choice made this possible, whatever the external circumstances.

This can’t work. Meaning is a collaborative activity. It is neither objective nor subjective. It is created by interaction, and abides in that space-between. Also, we do not have perfect internal freedom. Selves are constituted by biology and by society and culture. People cannot become ideal independent rational agents with perfectly-crisp boundaries and unlimited free will.

Bizarrely, while advocating total rejection of social values, several of the most important existentialists also advocated totalitarian social systems. For example, Heidegger supported Nazism and Sartre supported Soviet communism. Camus, last and best of the existentialists, was left to diagnose both its failure modes. He explained how purely subjective meaning slides into nihilism, split with Sartre over communism, and consistently denounced totalitarianism.

Unfortunately, existentialism’s incoherent combination of extreme individualism and extreme collectivism carried on into the countercultures a couple decades later. That was a main reason for their failure.

  • 1. Or, at any rate, this was widely believed.
  • 2. The American Civil War was the first industrial war overall, anticipating most of the features of WWI on a smaller—but still appalling—scale.
  • 3. Around the same time—1951—Kenneth Arrow proved mathematically↗︎︎ that there is no such thing as a “fair” system of government. This could be seen as part of the general collapse of rational certainty in the 1914–1964 period. I suspect Arrow’s proof significantly influenced elite decision-makers, as the general crisis in rationality did, even though there’s never been any public awareness of it.
  • 4. This movement in the arts was called “modernism↗︎︎”. As I mentioned earlier, in other contexts “modern” refers to different periods. In particular, “modernism” in the arts corresponds to the breakdown of the “modernity” that prevailed from the 1400s through the 1800s.
  • 5. Artistic modernism grew out of Romanticism. Romantic art was sometimes explicitly anti-rational, but still mainly worked within the Classical forms. It maintained strong emotional coherence, and was more-or-less realistic. Generally it also supported existing social structures, or at most sought to reform them, rather than destroy them.
  • 6. Calvinism pioneered this move, but you see the same in communist prudery, for example. Romanticism, in both the artistic and spiritual realms, revolted against puritanism—and so was a precursor to the 1960s counterculture.
  • 7. Of course, success in adapting to systematic requirements depended both on one’s personal capacity and predilections, and on one’s position in the social structure.
  • 8. On the other hand, fascist ethno-nationalism was not exactly universalist, where the 1960s–80s countercultures were; and communism at least pretended to rationality.
  • 9. Some communists argue that all supposed communist regimes were not really↗︎︎ communist, and true communism would not be totalitarian. I find this unconvincing, but have added “actually-existing” to avoid arguing about it. I wonder whether anyone argues that true fascism would not be totalitarian?
  • 10. Not coincidentally, my page on eternalist kitsch draws heavily on Kundera’s analysis of totalitarian kitsch.
  • 11. As I write this, ISIS—the global caliphate—is just about to conquer Rome. According to the caliph, as quoted in his press releases today, anyway.
  • 12. Actually, as of the time I’m writing this early in 2015, those sections of the book exist only as notes, and do not yet appear on the web. Existentialism is relevant to many of the themes of Meaningness, and I will discuss it in—at minimum—the chapters on meaningfulness, boundaries, self, and purpose.

The collapse of rational certainty

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

For centuries, the systematic mode provided certainty, based on illusory understandings of meaningness↗︎︎. Its certainty and understandings rested on two foundations: the Christian Church and scientific rationality. In the early 1900s, both failed.

Everyone knows a little about one half of the story: how science undermined religious belief, but failed to provide an alternative basis for meaning.

Less well known is the story of how rationalist certainty ended; how it dug too deep, and undermined its own foundations. After a series of crises, the inescapable conclusion was that mathematics and physics cannot supply the ultimate↗︎︎ justifications that seemed possible in the 1800s.

I believe this was a major factor in the breakdown of the systematic mode and eventual collapse of all systems of meaning. That is not widely recognized, perhaps for several reasons:

  • Since we have lived without rationalist certainty for nearly a century, it is difficult now to appreciate the shock and terror its loss provoked at the time.
  • It was only the cognitive elites who fully understood and felt the loss. As the mass media explained that there was a problem, only a vague anxiety that science no longer made sense trickled down.
  • Mathematicians and scientists have mostly learned to live with ambiguity and incoherence.
  • The consequences have still not been fully felt, because rationalist eternalism is still common—even though it is known to be unworkable.
  • The loss of rationalist certainty was deliberately misinterpreted by anti-rationalist eternalists↗︎︎, and given spurious new quasi-religious meanings. (This comes in monist↗︎︎ and dualist↗︎︎ flavors. The monist version promotes quantum woo, Gödel woo, and so on. The dualist version is Christian (or Islamic or dualist-Hindu) woo. The general reasoning is: “rationality has failed, therefore it can’t rule out our metaphysical dogmas, therefore our dogmas are Ultimate Truth.” Monist irrationalism justifies Idealism and the unity of the True Self↗︎︎ with The Absolute: “blah blah Consciousness blah blah God blah ineffable wonderfulness blah.” Dualist irrationalism justifies Creationism, Sharia, and afterlife Salvation.)

The end of rationalist certainty was not one event. It came as a series of unexpected, unwanted discoveries, throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A full account would take a long book. Here I will cover only some key events: non-Euclidean geometry, relativity, quantum, and the foundational crisis in mathematics caused by problems with infinities.

Most people probably know that relativity and quantum came as shocks, but maybe not quite why. The crisis in mathematics is less known, but perhaps more important, because it was even more fundamental.

Countercultures: modernity’s last gasp

The Battle of Gibraltar (1607): painting showing galleons in combat

The countercultural mode of the 1960s-80s marked the final attempts to rescue the glory of systems from the maw of nihilistic collapse. It failed, and we live in its wreckage.

It would be polite to say “enduring influence” but I’d rather call it “wreckage.” As civilization burned, we built two vast, fantastical, ornate galleons as escape ships. But they were not the slightest bit sea-worthy; and they collided and broke up in the harbor. The crash left a floating mass of broken spars and tangled lines, choking access to the exit.

Millions of people are still trying to live on that flotsam, so you call across: “It’s a pile of water-logged junk; the rest will sink soon; why don’t you come join us in our fleet of nimble new watercraft?” They jeer that your pathetic little boats are made of plastic, and you say “it’s not plastic, it’s a kevlar composite kayak,” and so on.

This is a metaphor for the development of modes of meaningness over the past half-century. “Kayaks” will become clear only when I get to the fluid mode. But let’s talk galleons: the two countercultures.

I define the countercultural mode of meaningness as:

Developing a new, alternative, universalist, eternalist↗︎︎, anti-rational system for society, culture, and self, meant to replace the mainstream.

I discuss two movements that fit this definition: the “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s-70s, and the “Moral Majority” counterculture of the 1970s-80s.1

Goals for this discussion

The content of the countercultures is still all around us: rock concerts and televangelists, for instance. Such content is familiar to everyone, and needs no review.

The structure and function of the countercultures may be less understood. What problems did they address, and how were their solutions supposed to work? In what ways did they succeed and fail, and why? That is my topic here.

One goal is to understand the continuing influence of the countercultures, and especially the way their “culture war” has polarized Western societies. I will suggest that much of this polarization is due to a pervasive misunderstanding of the structure and function of the countercultures. Better understanding might help heal the rift. The two had much more in common than they recognized—both in terms of what was right about them, and what was wrong. They were both good-faith attempts to rescue systematic eternalism, using similar methods. That was impossible, however, and they both failed for the same reasons.

The following mode, the subcultural mode↗︎︎, can only be analyzed as a response to countercultural failure—so the failure must be understood. The subcultural and atomized↗︎︎ modes also failed, so we still have most of the same problems—but in different forms, because each mode has transformed meaningness↗︎︎ in its own way.

The countercultural mode is “native” only for the Baby Boom generation. It is very different from the subcultural and atomized modes, native to Generations X and Y. One goal of this whole history of meaningness is to help give people in each generation access to each other’s way of processing meaning.

Overview of the section

I’ll begin by expanding on the definition “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems,” showing how the two countercultures fit each part of that.

The counterculture” generally refers to the youth movement of the 1960s to early 1970s. The idea that the American “Christian conservative” movement of the late 1970s and 1980s was also a counterculture may seem implausible at first. It does fit that definition, however.

I will suggest that the two countercultures are best understood as monist↗︎︎ and dualist↗︎︎, respectively. You might call them “leftist” and “rightist,” but those words are not well-defined. In fact, “left” and “right” changed their meanings during the countercultural era, in what I will describe as a “ninety degree clockwise rotation.”

Both countercultures attempted to address the problems of meaningness caused by the failure of the systematic mode during the first half of the 20th century. Although the content of their proposed solutions were often opposed, the structure was the same. Both attempted to create a new, optimistic, revitalized systematicity, by rejecting rationality and developing new religious technologies of the self. Both sought to reform society by collapsing the distinction between the personal and the political.

Both countercultures used the time distortion tricks of “invented traditions” and “timeworn futures” to make their dubious proposals seem more attractive. The “hippie” counterculture pretended to be progressive, but mainly recycled early-1800s Romanticism; the “Moral Majority” counterculture pretended to be traditional, but had a radical modern agenda. These deliberate deceptions account for some of the acrimony of the culture war.

Although both countercultures developed impressively thick and wide approaches to problems of meaning, both failed, for the same reason. Systematicity can never succeed on its own terms; it cannot be absolute. Reality is nebulous↗︎︎, and systems cannot fully grasp its variability. The universalism of the countercultures was their undoing. They could not accommodate the growing demand for cultural, social, and psychological diversity. Subcultures could, and did.

I find understanding the countercultures as monist and dualist helpful, in the light of my earlier analysis of what is right and wrong in these two stances↗︎︎, and how the correct aspects of each can be combined and reconciled in the complete stance↗︎︎ of participation↗︎︎. This suggests ways the “left vs. right” polarization of current politics, culture, and society might also be resolvable.

The countercultures were the two final attempts to rescue eternalism: the last gasp of modernity. The following, subcultural mode was the first in-breath of the post-systematic—or post-modern—world.

  • 1. Some earlier movements might also fit this definition; for instance Romanticism and existentialism. Socialism would fit except it was rationalist; fascism would fit except it was non-universalist. All four of these fed into the 60s-80s movements. I concentrate on the 60s-80s because my goal is to understand the most direct influences on our current mode of meaningness, rather than developing a general theory of history. Islamic fundamentalism is also mainly countercultural; I will return to this point later in the history.

What makes a counterculture?

Galleon wreck on beach
Artwork courtesy↗︎︎ Cesar Sampedro

I defined the two countercultures as “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems.” This page expands that definition, explaining the characteristics shared by the two. It also begins to contrast them with subculturalism—the following mode of meaningness↗︎︎.

Recall that the two countercultures are the monist↗︎︎ “radical” 1960s-70s youth movement and the dualist↗︎︎ “conservative” movement of the 1970s-80s. The next page explains how these relate to monism and dualism. It also explains why I call the “Moral Majority” conservative movement a counterculture—but that should start to become clear already in this page.

The discussion here is America-centric, because that’s what I know best. Much of it applies to other countries, but details differ.

New

After the nightmare of WWII, everyone was exhausted, and just wanted everything to go back to normal for a while. “Normal” would mean the systematic mode functioning smoothly; and the 1950s were dedicated to making that happen. But none of the problems of meaningness from the first half of the century had gone away. Beneath the veneer of normality, the cracks in the systems were still widening.

Both countercultures were motivated by disgust at the hypocrisy of the mainstream. The mainstream’s relatively smooth functioning was based on eternalistic pretending. In fact, mainstream society, culture, and self now failed to provide meaning. They had been rotted from within by nihilism↗︎︎, leaving a brittle shell of eternalistic↗︎︎ forms that concealed fundamental corruption. Shell-shocked, these systems were going through the motions with a business-as-usual attitude, but without authentic commitment.

Both countercultures perceived a pervasive moral breakdown in the mainstream, caused by loss of meaning, although they disagreed about specific values.

Alternative

The countercultures considered tinkering around the edges inadequate. They proposed wholesale replacement of mainstream society, culture, and self with alternative systems. They defined themselves point-by-point in contrast with the mainstream; that opposition was the counter in counterculture.

In the 1970s, “alternative” was a synonym for “monist counterculture,” in fact. An “alternative bookstore” sold New Age books; an “alternative grocer” sold alfalfa sprouts and tofu. Both were organized as anarchist collectives. The dualist counterculture positioned itself as the alternative to a society whose institutions had been captured by degenerate liberalism. It particularly opposed decisions by the American Supreme Court such as Roe v. Wade (abortion), Engel v. Vitale (school prayer) and Bob Jones University (racial discrimination). Both countercultures used the rhetoric of romantic rebellion against illegitimate authority to motivate followers.

The subcultures, by contrast, were not interested in replacing the mainstream; they just wanted to be left alone to do their own thing. In fact, during most of the subcultural era, there was no mainstream. The many subcultures were different from each other, but they were not “alternative.”

Universalist

Universalism—the claim that what is right, is right for everyone, everywhere, eternally—is a key feature of the systematic mode. The countercultures retained it: both proposed universalist alternatives. The monist counterculture said that everyone should recycle, get over their sexual hangups, and expand their consciousness. The dualist counterculture said that everyone should go to church, save it for marriage, and pledge allegiance to the flag.

Universalism proved to be the countercultures’ undoing. It became apparent in the 1980s that neither counterculture could command a majority. People are unfixably diverse, and different people want all sorts of different social, cultural, and personal arrangements.

The subcultural mode abandoned universalism; that was its foremost difference from the countercultural mode.

Eternalist

Both countercultures tried to rescue systematic eternalism↗︎︎ from creeping nihilism↗︎︎. Both had optimistic, positive visions, to make everything authentically meaningful—in contrast to the make-believe mainstream.

The subcultures, on the other hand, were often explicitly nihilist↗︎︎. Punk was the first subculture; the Sex Pistols’ “I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist / I don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it / I want to destroy the passerby” blew counterculturalism to bits.

Anti-rational

Both countercultures explicitly rejected rationality, which had been a foundation of the systematic mode. All possible rational bases for systems had been tried, and had failed. Rationality had shown that meaning was neither objective nor subjective, which was misunderstood as implying nihilism↗︎︎: that meaning did not exist at all. Rationality, counterculturalists thought, was probably to blame for all the Twentieth Century horrors: the World Wars, loss of Christian faith, rampant materialism↗︎︎, ecological devastation, abortion, and nuclear weapons.

New anti-rational religious movements organized meanings for both countercultures. The hippie counterculture ransacked history to find and revive monist spiritual systems. They adopted “Eastern religions,” plus vintage-1800 German Romantic Idealism, which was repackaged as “the New Age” to disguise its unsavory origins. The dualist counterculture replaced rationalized mainline Christianity with wacky fundamentalist, charismatic, and dispensationalist innovations.

On both sides, these new religions promoted supernatural practices and transformative inner experiences (“enlightenment” and “being born again”). They deemphasized or dropped codes of conduct and doctrine.

Subcultures, having set aside the failed quest for ultimacy and universality, did not need to take any particular position on rationality. With the countercultures having passed, there is room for the fluid mode to reclaim a relativized, non-foundational, pragmatic rationality.

Systems

The monist counterculture claimed to offer revolutionary new ideas, and both it and the dualist one made some genuine innovations, but neither broke away from the fundamental paradigm of systematicity. At their best, they offered new, different systems. However, it was systematicity itself that was fatally flawed; and so the countercultures sank.

Subculturalism stepped away from systematicity—or what many historians call “modernity.” The countercultural era was modernity’s last gasp, and the subcultures the first breath of postmodernity.

Hippies and Evangelicals: monist and dualist countercultures

Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer, hippie guru and architect of the modern Religious Right

“The counterculture” generally refers to the youth movement of the 1960s-70s: rock and roll, anti-war protests, psychedelics, the New Left, hippies, and the sexual revolution. While puzzling out how these elements cohered—to understand the counterculture functionally and structurally—I had a peculiar realization.

A second movement shared “the” counterculture’s abstract features—its structure and function. Based in Christian Fundamentalism, it might be called “the Moral Majority,” after one of its main organizations. It too offered “a new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational system.” This was the same mode of relating↗︎︎ to meaningness↗︎︎, even though its content was deliberately opposed to most of what the hippie counterculture stood for.

This page explains how these two countercultures adopted↗︎︎ the stances↗︎︎ of monism↗︎︎ and dualism↗︎︎, respectively. This is key to understanding their workings, as detailed in later pages.

Both countercultures had broken up by 1990, but the current American culture war is fought from floating fragments of their wreckage. I believe that a better understanding of how the two countercultures related to each other, and how both relate to subsequent modes of meaningness↗︎︎, may help resolve unnecessary contemporary conflicts.

Monism, dualism, and the countercultures

“Left” and “right” would be the obvious names for the two countercultures, but that could be misleading. These terms are not well-defined, and had different meanings during the countercultural era than they did before or after.

Our current left and right like to be called “progressive” and “traditional”; and the countercultures might have liked that too. However, I will suggest that this characterization is a deliberately misleading fiction, promoted by both.

It would be more accurate to cast the countercultures in religious terms, as “holism” versus “holiness.” Or, in ethical terms, as “permissive” versus “restrictive”; or in social terms as “egalitarian” versus “respecting hierarchical differences.”

These contrasts concern boundaries and distinctions, one of the main dimensions of meaningness. So I call the two countercultures “monist” and “dualist”:

  • Monism↗︎︎ seeks to deny↗︎︎, dissolve, or weaken boundaries and distinctions. (Holism is nearly the same thing as monism.) It seeks to discover and strengthen connections.
  • Dualism↗︎︎ seeks to fixate↗︎︎, establish, or strengthen boundaries and distinctions. (Holiness is all about sharpening the difference between the sacred or Godly and the profane or sinful.) It seeks to sever connections that cross apparent boundaries.

Monism and dualism are both wrong, and both harmful. Every boundary is always both patterned↗︎︎ and nebulous↗︎︎. Boundaries are not, cannot be, and should not be, either non-existent nor perfectly sharp. Severe problems, including our current culture war, follow from trying to eliminate or absolutize them. An understanding of participation↗︎︎, the stance↗︎︎ that the resolves the monism/dualism confusion, may help resolve these conflicts.

This page explains what made the “hippie” counterculture monist, first; and then what made the “Moral Majority” counterculture dualist. We’ll see also that the monist counterculture had some dualist elements; and that the dualist counterculture tacitly accepted some “hippie” monist boundary-blurrings.

Much of this material is controversial. Reading it, you may have strong emotional reactions, categorizing particular countercultural moves as good or bad. I would suggest trying to suspend such judgements. Each had, I think, both good and bad effects.

I hope you will recognize that I do not support either counterculture against the other. I find some aspects of each attractive, and some repellent. Overall, it is most important to understand why both were wrong, and both failed. But it is also valuable to understand what was right in each, and what might be worth saving from their wreckage.

On this page, I go into the history of the dualist counterculture in somewhat more detail, because it’s probably less well-known to most readers, and because I’ve written about the monist-countercultural religious left extensively elsewhere↗︎︎. If I seem critical of the 1980s Religious Right here, I assure you that I was just as hostile to the monist left there.

How the monist counterculture was monist

The specific contents of the monist counterculture—from recycling to Vietnam war protests—are familiar. Less obvious is the general pattern: that the specifics reflect the monist stance↗︎︎. It attempted to dissolve many particular boundaries, on the theory that they were illegitimate, alienating, and needlessly limiting. I’ll discuss these boundary erasures here only briefly. Some I’ve explained earlier in the book; many, I’ll return to in greater detail later.

Psychedelic drugs were a cornerstone of the counterculture; boundary-blurring is one of their major effects. They can give a sense of ultimate↗︎︎, cosmic unity—the supposed accomplishment↗︎︎ of the monist stance. Short of that, they often melt distinctions of all sorts. It’s common, for instance, to have experiences of the commonality of all people, of humans with other creatures, and of the animate and inanimate.

Ecology—a new science—revealed that all life is connected in an intricate web of mutual dependencies. A cultural and political movement based on it began with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring↗︎︎ in 1962. Taking the unification of concerns a step further, countercultural theorist Theodore Roszak promoted “ecopsychology↗︎︎,” collapsing the distinctions among the natural, political, psychological, and spiritual worlds.

When you have experienced your intimate sameness with a tree, it is hard to take seriously human categories such as religions, nations, and races. The political universalism of the counterculture—the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, feminism—was based in this monist conception of human commonality.

The feminist slogan “the personal is political” expressed the essence of monist politics. The private/public boundary, a foundational principle for Victorian systematicity, disintegrated. The distinction between ethics (“ought” in the personal realm) and politics (“ought” in the public realm) collapsed. This collapse caused the culture war we’ve been cursed with since, so I devote a full page to it later.

Blurring the self/other distinction also contributed to the collapse of the boundary between psychology and religion (or “spirituality”). Monist religion holds that one’s True Self↗︎︎ is the same as God, and the entire universe. Thus, exploration of one’s personal psychology gives direct insight into the most profound metaphysical questions. Monism erased the boundary between sacred and profane matters; nothing was any longer outside the purview of spiritual concern.

Since the personal was now both political and spiritual, the distinction between religion and politics also collapsed. Demands for political change were considered not merely a matter of one social group promoting its material interests against others, but to reflect Ultimate Truth as given by the monist eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.

The “sexual revolution↗︎︎” dissolved the sexual boundary of marriage, and eliminated most distinctions between “morally” acceptable and unacceptable sexual acts. The sexual revolution also reflected a collapse of the division between private and public morality. Privately, sexual mores had been loosening for half a century. A considerable gap had opened between what people did in their bedrooms and what they said in public. This was one of the most obvious forms of the 1950s moral hypocrisy that motivated the counterculture. To a significant extent, the sexual revolution merely allowed everyone to acknowledge what many had already been doing.

Feminism broke down boundaries between male and female social, sexual, and family roles.

The nuclear family home—a mainly Victorian middle-class invention—had long been found restrictive and isolating by many. The monist counterculture advocated replacing it with communes, collectives, and intentional communities: social structures that emphasize connections across biological families, and that break down the private/public boundary.

How the monist counterculture was dualist

Monism and dualism contain each other, and each turns into the other near boundaries. Monism—the denial↗︎︎ of all boundaries—nevertheless draws an absolute boundary between itself and dualism. It rejects dualism as an absolutely unacceptable evil. It seeks to destroy dualism; or, failing that, to purify itself of any dualistic tendencies.

The monist counterculture went out of its way to shock, aggravate, and alienate “squares,” i.e. dualists. The point was to harden the distinction between monists and dualists. As Ken Kesey put it, “Either you are on the bus, or you are off the bus.” “On the bus↗︎︎” came to mean “monist”—and either you rode monism all the way, or you were off the bus and left behind.

Hippies were a tiny subculture in 1964, the year of the Further bus trip↗︎︎. Requiring intense commitment, and some hostility to outsiders, are necessary for maintaining the integrity of a subculture—as we’ll see later. Kesey’s attitude was sensible then.

Subcultural hippiedom formed the core of the monist counterculture (together with Berkeley student radicalism). As a local subculture of dozens scaled up into a global counterculture of tens of millions, “either you are on or you are off” became the recipe for the culture war that still plagues us.

How the dualist counterculture was dualist

The dualist counterculture was a mirror image of the monist one: the same shape, with many aspects flipped left-to-right, and others left intact.1

The creators of the dualist counterculture presented it largely as a reaction to the monist one. In their view, the monist counterculture had wrongly blurred numerous boundaries. Those therefore needed sharpening—the essence of dualism.

As a point-by-point opposition to the monist program, the dualist “counter-counterculture↗︎︎” necessarily took on its opponent’s structure. We could go through all the boundaries I listed above as denied by the monist counterculture, and we’d find that most were fixated by the dualist one. For example, dualists promoted:

  • man’s dominion over nature
  • submission to the Creator
  • and to legitimate secular authority
  • nationalism
  • racial segregation
  • distinct gender roles
  • the sanctity of marriage versus the sinfulness of non-marital sex
  • human rights starting from the instant of conception, not gradually over months

All this is familiar territory. I want only to point out that the unifying feature of these positions is that they draw hard boundaries.

The dualist counterculture also claimed to want to restore “traditional values.” It was never clear which era it proposed to return to; in fact, it wanted to “restore” a romanticized, mythical past in which the systematic mode actually worked. But to the extent that the systematic mode did work—in the 1850s or 1950s—it was partly on the basis of dualism. Taking those eras as ideals naturally also led to dualism.

So, for reasons of both reaction and nostalgia, insistence on boundaries is the common feature throughout the explicit “values agenda” of the dualist counterculture.

How the dualist counterculture was monist

Although the Religious Right presented itself as a point-by-point repudiation, it adopted much of the structure, strategy, tactics, and conceptual framework of the monist counterculture.2 Several factors forced this similarity:

  • It implicitly adopted some monist principles
  • It deliberately imitated the monist counterculture
  • Surprisingly many leftist hippies later became Evangelical rightists
  • Both were responses to the same failures of the systematic mode
  • Both retained the systematic mode’s commitment to universalism
  • Both borrowed from 1800s Romanticism
  • Monism and dualism both necessarily turn into the other when pressed

As a consequence, the dualist counterculture tacitly accepted and promoted several of the monist counterculture’s erasures of boundaries:

  • between the personal/private and the political/public
  • between ethics, religion, politics, and psychology
  • between religions and sects

The two countercultures were in violent, albeit unstated, agreement on these points. They were also, I believe, disastrously wrong: these boundaries are nebulous↗︎︎ but necessary. This shared error explains many of the social, cultural, and psychological problems we face today. I will explain that, bit by bit, throughout “How meaning fell apart.”

Particularly, “Renegotiating self and society” addresses the collapse of the private/public distinction; “The personal is political” the collapse of that boundary; and “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self” covers the collapse of the distinction between psychology and religion.

The two remaining sections of this page cover the collapse of the boundary between politics and religion, and between ethics and religion, in the dualist counterculture.

Unifying politics and religion

The unity of the political right with Evangelical Christianity—and with particular views on sexual morality—now seems obvious, necessary, and eternal. But it was new, sudden, shocking, and deliberately engineered in the mid-1970s. For outsiders, this was (and remains) the main manifestation of the dualist counterculture.

For decades before the 1970s, Evangelicals were socially marginal, apolitical, and divided into innumerable small hostile sects. They had come together in the 1920s in support of Prohibition and against teaching evolution. The 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” made Fundamentalism look ridiculous, and Evangelicals retreated from public life in humiliation. After the Second World War, some re-entered politics—mainly on the left. Difficult as it may be to imagine now, as late as the 1960s, the majority of Evangelicals opposed capitalism, nationalism, and militarism, and supported women’s suffrage and abortion rights. The social activism of leftist Evangelicals in the 1950s-60s began to blur the boundary between ethics, politics, and religion, and was a prototype for the 1970s-80s Religious Right.3

Evangelicalism’s merger with the political right was primarily authored by Francis and Frank Schaeffer, whose extraordinary story I recount on the next page. Francis was a socially liberal Fundamentalist theologian who led a hippie commune. His teenage son Frank somehow conceived a passionate concern for the rights of the unborn. Abortion had been an exclusively Catholic and mainly left issue; Protestants and Republicans mostly considered it acceptable even up to the time of natural birth.4

Frank convinced his reluctant5 father to campaign against abortion. Their roadshow was unexpectedly, hugely popular, and started to convert Evangelicals to the cause.

Republican Party operatives took note. Although the Party had long supported abortion rights, in 1972 they tried to appeal to Catholics (mainly Democrats) by reversing their position. That failed—but the Schaeffers’ popularity made them realize the same strategy might work on Evangelicals (also majority left). They reached out to the Schaeffers,6 and soon cemented a deal of mutual cooptation. The Schaeffers would deliver Evangelical votes to the Party; the Party would make opposition to abortion an ideological centerpiece for the political Right. (Frank Schaeffer later said that their alliance with the Right was essentially an accident, which he came to regret.7 They could just as easily allied with the Democratic Party, and in fact the Schaeffers’ socially liberal views would have been a better fit there.)

The Moral Majority↗︎︎, the most famous dualist-counterculture institution, was founded on Francis Schaeffer’s advice. Jerry Falwell, its public face, had firmly believed that politics and religion didn’t mix.8 Schaeffer changed Falwell’s mind—and convinced him to make abortion the Moral Majority’s central issue. Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority; he provided the political, organizational, and financial backing. His expertise was creating think tanks and lobbying groups that connected money from big business donors with economically conservative political ideology.

The Schaeffer/Weyrich strategy worked astonishingly well. On the religious side, within a few years, fervent commitment to the anti-abortion cause became the single-issue “badge↗︎︎” of membership in the entire political-religious dualist counterculture.9 It is not credible that tens of millions of Americans who had zero interest in abortion in 1975 discovered deep concern for the well-being of fetuses by 1980. Instead, public opposition to abortion became the main symbol, or shibboleth, for good standing in a counterculture whose actual appeal lay elsewhere.10

On the political side, the Moral Majority was widely considered responsible for the election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980.11 Reagan ran against the incumbent Democratic President, Jimmy Carter. Carter was the first “born again” President, and had taken the Evangelical vote in 1976. However, despite his personal opposition to abortion, Carter refused to make it a political issue, which Evangelicals saw as a betrayal. Reagan was not personally particularly religious, had been pro-choice only a few years earlier, and did not stress social issues in his campaign. He was primarily an economic conservative and nationalist, and in office delivered almost nothing the Moral Majority wanted. However, by 1980, the Republican Party had become the Evangelical Party, so none of that mattered.

Unifying religion by replacing piety with “moral values”

Evangelical Christians had long been split among numerous separatist, schismatic sects. Most were intensely hostile to Catholics and Jews, and fought each other over arcane metaphysical distinctions that were largely forgotten by the end of the decade.12

Francis Schaeffer not only united Evangelicals across sectarian lines, he also created durable alliances between them and conservative Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.13 Under Schaeffer’s influence, Falwell—a Southern Baptist—made the Moral Majority ecumenical: Weyrich was Catholic, and its third founder was Howard Phillips, a Jewish Republican politician.14 Falwell increasingly downplayed his extremist moral positions, including his formerly overt racism.15

Forging a mass movement required dropping most of the traditional religious content of Evangelicalism—because that was extreme, incomprehensible, and unacceptable to nearly everyone. And anyway, no two Evangelical theologians could agree on it!

The new dualist counterculture replaced traditional doctrine and piety with “values” and “experiences.” It was easy to get broad agreement on those. I’ll discuss the new Christian “experiences” in “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self”; and “values” here.

Substituting “values” for traditional Christianity was the culmination of a process that had been underway for most of a century. By the late 1800s, it was obvious that much of what the Bible said was wrong. Mainline Protestants adopted a liberal, modernist theology according to which the important thing about Christianity was its humanistic ethical teachings, not its metaphysical beliefs. Fundamentalism, in reaction, insisted that everything in the Bible was literally true. In the 1920s, internal conflict between modernists and fundamentalists split most American Protestant sects.

The religious leaders of the dualist counterculture were Fundamentalists. A few decades earlier, they had taught not only Biblical inerrancy, but also an ascetic moral code that forbade smoking, drinking, dancing, watching movies or plays, listening to secular music, and all “worldly pursuits” (including politics). These sins all lead straight to damnation and eternal hellfire! This was a non-starter for a 1970s mass movement.

In the counterculture, it was adequate to say you believed everything in the Bible, even if you had little idea what was in there, and in practice disagreed with much of it. The main thing was “believing” in Jesus as your personal savior.

It was also adequate to “have values,” rather than conforming to a moral code.16 “Values” were opinions about things other people did. The most important values were condemning abortion and “the homosexual lifestyle.” (Both were non-traditional: homosexuality was not a significant issue before the 1970s; and, as I mentioned, Evangelicals had mostly considered abortion acceptable.)

The “values” innovation effectively replicated the Christian Modernist move of replacing religious piety with ethics, but went a step further: opinions replaced both belief and morality. “Having” an opinion means stating it forcefully, or assenting to it, when ritually required. It does not necessarily involve belief, in the ordinary sense that you believe your car needs a wash. You must “believe” in Creation Science rather than evolution—but since it has no consequence for your everyday life, this is often no more than performing a public tribal loyalty oath.17

I’m not taking sides here; this was equally true of the monist counterculture, in which you were also required to “believe” endless absurdities—that is, to agree to them in public↗︎︎.

Further reading

I started this page by recounting my “peculiar realization” that the Moral Majority was structurally and functionally similar to the hippie counterculture it opposed. It took a year to convince myself that this was accurate and significant. At first it seemed probably mistaken; then likely an accidental and superficial resemblance. But eventually, I decided it was an exciting and remarkably clever discovery.

Turns out, it’s old hat. In subsequent reading, I found that many historians, and even some members of the movement, have pointed out the countercultural nature of the 1980s Religious Right. They have traced many structural parallels and historical connections between the two countercultures.

Describing the two countercultures in terms of monism and dualism does seem to be new. These categories are important in metaphysics, but have mostly not been applied to culture, ethics, or politics before.

The two best overview articles I’ve found on the web analyze the similarity between the two countercultures from a libertarian, subcultural point of view:

Libertarians, and most Gen X subculturalists, stand outside the usual framing of the culture war. They are perhaps better able to regard both sides dispassionately, and to see their commonalities, rather than identifying with one against the other.

In writing this page, I made heavy use of Axel R. Schäfer’s Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right↗︎︎, an academic history.18

Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics↗︎︎ is an excellent history of the transformation of American Christianity during the countercultural era.

The next page, on the Schaeffer family, references various sources I also found useful while writing this one.

  • 1. I have researched the history of only the American dualist counterculture. I am not sure whether other Western countries developed anything similar (whereas the American monist counterculture was certainly influential elsewhere). Islamic fundamentalism is also a dualist counterculture, and structurally similar to the American one.
  • 2. I find this borrowing extremely interesting, because it reveals intellectual and emotional commonalities that were deliberately obscured by both countercultures. Although I’m tempted to detail the history here, not everyone is as geeky about such things as I am. If you’d like to learn more, try Countercultural Conservatives↗︎︎, pp. 93-101, 123, 132-6, et passim. Also, Hippies of the Religious Right↗︎︎ is apparently entirely about this, but I haven’t read it.
  • 3. See Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right↗︎︎ for a detailed history.
  • 4. For a brief popular discussion, see “When evangelicals were pro-choice↗︎︎.” For an academic treatment, Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade↗︎︎,” Yale Law Journal 2028:2011. For context, Countercultural Conservatives↗︎︎ and Sex, Mom, and God↗︎︎. From the last, pp. 128-9: “Dr. W. A. Criswell (a two-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention)… was on record↗︎︎ saying he didn’t think life began until a baby took his or her first breath.”
  • 5. “I don’t want to be identified with some Catholic issue. I’m not putting my reputation on the line for them!” Dad shouted back. “So you won’t speak out because it’s a ‘Catholic issue?’” “What does abortion have to do with art and culture? I’m known as an intellectual, not for this sort of political thing!” shouted Dad. Crazy For God↗︎︎, pp. 285-6.
  • 6. Billy Zeoli, Gerald Ford’s Whitehouse chaplain, was the first main go-between. Congressman Jack Kemp was an early close ally. Eventually the Schaeffers worked with most of the most powerful Republicans, including Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush.
  • 7. In his fascinating Crazy For God↗︎︎.
  • 8. Quoted from “People & Ideas: Jerry Falwell↗︎︎”; God in America. Also there: “In his famous 1964 sermon, ‘Ministers and Marches,’ Falwell declared, ‘Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners….’ His remarks were widely interpreted as a rebuke to the political activism of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” Similarly Billy Graham, who became another major spokesperson for the Religious Right. “Most evangelical leaders, following Billy Graham’s lead, weren’t interested in ‘going political.’ When [Francis Schaeffer] asked Billy why he wasn’t taking a stand on abortion, Billy answered that he had been burned by getting too close to Nixon and was never going to poke his head over the ramparts of the ‘I-only-preach-the-gospel’ trench again. He said he didn’t want to be ‘political.’” Crazy For God↗︎︎, p. 290.
  • 9. I explained moral badges in “Ethics is advertising↗︎︎.” My discussion there was based on Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior↗︎︎.
  • 10. Exactly why the abortion strategy worked so well, and the precise appeal of dualist counterculture, remains somewhat mysterious. I have read many plausible partial explanations, but no convincing synthesis. Most authors agree that the desire to make sex more dangerous for people of other socioeconomic classes is central to American “social conservatism.” Research by Jason Weeden and his collaborators suggests American religiosity is based on practical benefits for a many-child reproductive strategy. A key paper is “Religious attendance as reproductive support,” Evolution and Human Behavior 29 (2008) 327–334. His The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It↗︎︎, written for a non-academic audience, lays out implications for electoral politics. I think Weeden’s work is on the right track, but there’s much it still doesn’t explain. For an interesting—albeit inconclusive and unconvincing—meta-discussion, see Bethany Moreton, “Why Is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism and Why Do So Few Historians Care Anything about It?↗︎︎,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 75, No. 3 (August 2009), pp. 717-738. Winning line: “Sodomites are a traditionally underrepresented market for abortion services.”
  • 11. Historians have later questioned whether the Moral Majority’s support actually was critical, or if Reagan would have been elected anyway. For much interesting discussion, see Doug Banwart’s “Jerry Falwell, the Rise of the Moral Majority, and the 1980 Election↗︎︎,” Western Illinois Historical Review Vol. V, Spring 2013. Also Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front↗︎︎, pp. 20ff.
  • 12. Among the most important were diverging dispensationalist millennialisms. I’ve spent many hours trying to figure out what, if anything, this dispute was about, and completely failed. However, it’s charmingly reminiscent of the ↗︎︎. It’s also entertaining and instructive to compare the Wikipedia article on sectarian millennialisms↗︎︎ with its article on heavy metal genres↗︎︎, which display similar fissiparous tendencies. More about that when we get to the evolutionary dynamics of subcultures↗︎︎.
  • 13. This despite his earlier decades in the trenches as a member of a Presbyterian sub-sub-sub-sect fighting holy wars against other Presbyterian sub-sub-sub-sects with infinitesimally different theological views.
  • 14. Separatist Fundamentalists denounced the Moral Majority for this inclusiveness.
  • 15. For decades, his main moral cause had been support for racial segregation, but by the late ’70s that was no longer respectable. The Moral Majority did make opposition to the Supreme Court’s Bob Jones University anti-segregation decision its second-most-important cause, notionally on religious freedom grounds. Ironically, the ungrateful University declared the Moral Majority “Satanic,” “holding that it was a step toward the apostate one-world church and government body as it would cross the line from a political alliance to a religious one between true Christians and the non-born-again, as forbidden by their interpretation of the Bible.” (Quote from the Wikipedia article on Jerry Falwell↗︎︎.)
  • 16. I suspect this was because by the 1970s, everyone from secular humanists to Fundamentalists was in nearly complete agreement on what acts are moral or immoral. An earlier chapter discusses this in terms of “ethical ease” and “ethical agreement”; morality was a solved problem.
  • 17. I’m not suggesting Fundamentalists secretly disbelieve what they assert in public, only that belief in the ordinary sense does not enter into it.
  • 18. Schäfer is not related to Francis Schaeffer, as far as I know.

The hippie family who invented contemporary conservatism

↗︎︎

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The Schaeffer family created the American Religious Right. Without the Schaeffers, more famous campaigners like Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham, and Anita Bryant would never have reached mainstream political audiences.

The Schaeffers were hippies. Too late, they realized they had created a monster. I found their story extraordinarily compelling: a tragedy in the mode of Ancient Greek drama.

There will be two parts to this page. The first is the remarkable tale of their lives and works.

The second concerns Francis Schaeffer’s analysis of the history of meaningness↗︎︎—which is closely parallel to the book you are reading here now. We came to many of the same conclusions. I feel a close intellectual kinship with Schaeffer, despite our very different paths and personalities, and very different ultimate commitments.

When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room”—that is, although world-views have many variations, there are not many basic world-views or basic presuppositions. —Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live↗︎︎

In fact, he found that the three “men left in the room” are nihilism↗︎︎ (with its close allies such as materialism↗︎︎ and existentialism); monist↗︎︎ mysticism; and dualist↗︎︎ eternalism↗︎︎—that is, Fundamentalist Christianity, in his case. These are my “Big Threestance↗︎︎ combinations—the three “basic world views.” His analyses and rejections of the first two were accurate, so he was left with only the third. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

I haven’t written the page yet. If you are interested in learning more from other sources, some I recommend are:

Francis Schaeffer↗︎︎,” a brief biography. (The Wikipedia entries for the Schaeffers are all lousy, unfortunately.)

“The dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer” is a good introduction to his life and thought, which appeared as a six-part series in Christianity Today, where it is paywalled. It appears here↗︎︎ for free (amidst other articles).

Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy For God↗︎︎ and Sex, Mom, and God↗︎︎ are un-put-downable accounts of his parents, his early life, and his role in making abortion the central American political issue. The books are fast-paced, fascinating, hilarious, easy to read, and moving. Not to be taken uncritically, but the publicly-checkable facts seem reliable.

Two good academic studies—I have read only part of each—are Schaeffer on the Christian Life: Countercultural Spirituality↗︎︎ and Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America↗︎︎.

Renegotiating self and society

Christians against greed: protest rally
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Ben Cumming

The failure of social and psychological systems propelled the 1960s-80s countercultures. Societies had required selves to conform to modern, unnatural systems of employment, government, and religion. These arrangements were invented and imposed with little regard for individuals or local communities.

They were founded on economic, political, and theological theories that were mainly abstract and rationalistic. They ignored innate human needs, desires, and proclivities. It’s a wonder they worked for as long as they did.

These obsolete modern ideologies included, for example, Taylorism, the Westphalian nation-state, and the Victorian family.

  • Scientific Taylorism↗︎︎ was the dominant theory of industrial management. It explicitly treated workers as machines whose performance should be optimized with intensive management controls.

  • A state is legitimate, according to the modern Westphalian↗︎︎ international system, if it rules a nation. A “nation” is defined as a set of people who share a single culture and social system. Rulers, therefore, did their best to force uniform systems on as many people as possible. This typically involved destroying most social traditions and institutions intermediate in scope between the nuclear family and the state.

  • The ideology of the traditional family developed in the 1800s↗︎︎, and in that century was mainly restricted to English-speaking middle class Protestants. (So it was not traditional for the working class, or for many American immigrants.) Its precisely-defined gender and parent/child roles, emphasis on a sharp division between the nuclear family and outside world, and strict life-long monogamy are historically unusual. They don’t function well for everyone.

The crisis of the self showed that organizing one’s psychology to systematic requirements, with a hard public/private boundary, was unworkable for many people. The fragmentation and isolation of communities and individuals was intolerable. After spending the 1950s whistling past the graveyard of systematicity, renegotiating the relationship between self and society became obviously urgent in the mid-1960s.

The previous half-century had developed two alternatives, totalitarianism and existentialism, which were pathological extremes of collectivism and individualism. The countercultures↗︎︎ attempted new, less absolutist renegotiations of the self/society relationship, which blurred the hard line between the two. However, both countercultures also drew on both totalitarianism and existentialism, and affirmed the values of both individualism and collectivism in ways that were incoherent and still extreme. This tended to heighten the self/society conflict, even while attempting to defuse it.

The countercultures failed because they retained systematic constraints—especially, universalism. They assumed that there must be one right way for individuals to be, and one right model for society, and the two must fit together harmoniously. Rather than challenging systematicity as such, they proposed new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems. That is, countercultures, as I have defined them.

Reforming self and reforming society

Free speech protest rally
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Jason

Both countercultures wrestled with the self/society conflict at both ends: at the self end through psychology and religion, and at the society end through “values-based” political action.

On the whole, the monist (“hippie”) counterculture wanted to reform the public sphere to better match private proclivities; the dualist (“Moral Majority”) counterculture wanted to reform private souls to better match public morality. So the monist counterculture was more influenced by existentialism, and the dualist one by totalitarianism, although both drew on both (as we shall see).

In both countercultures, some activists argued that individual spiritual transformation was a prerequisite to social change, and others argued that social reform was a necessary support to constructing better selves. Despite internal conflict between these wings, both movements adopted the Romantic idea that personal change can quasi-magically fix society by the propagation of good vibrations. Both also adopted the Romantic idea that if only society were properly organized, everyone would live together in happy harmony.

The next two pages, “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self” and “The personal is political,” describe both countercultures’ reform efforts at these two ends. Inevitably, they overlap to some extent, because both movements’ program was to merge them.

The remainder of this page is an overview of these programs, in terms of particular problems in the self/society interface and their attempted solutions. Some worked reasonably well, and were adopted as stable policy by governments; others were harmful or just obviously impractical. I will sketch the vicissitudes of these innovations in later modes: subcultural↗︎︎, atomized↗︎︎, and fluid↗︎︎.

Overall strategy

Overall, both countercultures sought to replace the artificial, seemingly-arbitrary social and personal requirements of the systematic mode with ones they considered natural. Unfortunately, their ideas about what would be natural were, in both cases, completely crazy. (In my opinion; but also this was widely acknowledged once the countercultural era ended.) Because both countercultures were eternalist↗︎︎, they took their insane ideologies as absolute and universal, and so tended toward harmful totalitarianism.

Replacing artificial systematic requirements with natural ones remains a popular goal. It’s a decent impulse, but unfortunately there is currently no alternative to artificial social systems capable of supporting a global population of billions. The future, fluid mode must find ways to simulate natural (choiceless↗︎︎) roles while keeping artificial systems running—at least until we develop some other alternative.

As I mentioned, both countercultures tried to blur the public/private boundary as a way of addressing alienation and isolation. This was a step in the right direction, but I will suggest that one reason the countercultures failed is that they offered no structural change in the self/society relationship. The development of subsocieties—structures intermediate in scale between family and state—was a major contribution of the subcultural mode.

Both countercultures considered rationality and objectivity the source of modern meaninglessness, materialism↗︎︎, and the loss of the sacred. Both rejected rationality, embraced subjectivism, and tried to evert subjective meanings to re-enchant the world; to restore its inherent sacred meaning. This was extremely harmful, I think. I hope the fluid mode can recognize meaning as real but neither objective nor subjective; and rationality as a valuable tool, but not an absolute principle↗︎︎ to be worshipped.

Technologies of the self

Acting according to formal roles, as demanded by systematic societies, is unnatural. If you develop a systematic self↗︎︎, it can be comfortable and empowering, but for most people↗︎︎ formal roles feel alienating. Why should artificial, systematic demands take precedence over your personal feelings and your relationships? Your public self feels false: mere play-acting of an arbitrary, often humiliating or incomprehensible script.

Both countercultures adopted the Romantic conception of a true self↗︎︎. That is an idealization of the private self, freed from arbitrary public conventions. Not the private self as it is, because that is neurotic and sinful and false, but the self reformed and perfected. You should find your true self, and then you should be true to it. You should speak and act from that self, regardless of social judgement, because it would comport naturally with the correct social organization. This is “sincerity” and “authenticity”↗︎︎—key values of both countercultures.

There is no true self, so this approach was mainly harmful. The atomized mode effectively abandoned “authenticity,” because it is obviously impossible to be “true” to an atomized self↗︎︎.

Modern employment is dehumanizing. (Deliberately so, under Taylorism.) The countercultures developed personal and small-group practices for personal emotional fulfillment, self expression, and “finding yourself.” These seem to me on the right track, but had limited success, mainly due to universalism—the denial of diversity. The subcultures made their greatest contribution here: expressive communal practices for “DIY” exploration of psychologies, aesthetic culture, and social models.

In complex, modern societies, most people have multiple formal roles, in additional to natural (biological) ones. The contrasts between roles cause internal fragmentation; you internalize external ways of being as “multiple selves.” Conflicts among them are disruptive and painful in both the communal↗︎︎ and systematic↗︎︎ modes, which expect internal coherence.

The countercultures promised new technologies for re-unifying the self. These didn’t work. The subcultural mode began to develop ways of managing a fragmented self; for reconciling and switching among selves. The fluid mode finds internal diversity comfortable and empowering.

Many counterculturalists tried to make membership in one of the countercultures the unifying theme of their identity. They considered themselves first and foremost conservative Christians or liberal New Agers; and only after that insurance claims managers, Iowans, or softball players. Their community was not their town, church, or company, but the brotherhood of all participants in their counterculture. This resonated with universalism: both countercultures treated all their members as equivalent. Countercultural identity didn’t work well, because a nation-scaled group is too large a group to provide functional community; and because each counterculture merely suppressed and denied its internal diversity.

Ecstatic experience is the natural antidote to rigid social requirements. That was banned in the systematic era. Modernized, rationalized Christianity had mostly also eliminated experience of the sacred and transcendent, emphasizing this-worldly humanistic ethics. Both countercultures produced new religions and quasi-religions emphasizing ecstatic practices, “direct experience,” and the supernatural. I think this was an important step forward, although the details were mostly wrong.

Social reform

Both countercultures tried to reorient society away from formal, systematic roles toward natural ones: family, unstructured friendships, and local communities. This was the obvious response to the painful gap between the private and public selves. However, it represents a partial reversion toward the choiceless mode, which isn’t capable of sustaining contemporary civilization. That could eventually become disastrous.

Both countercultures sought to revise systematic social norms to make them more natural. The monist counterculture thought humanistic, egalitarian norms would be more natural. The dualist counterculture thought godly, hierarchical norms would be more natural. This divergence led to the destructive and unwinnable culture war.

In the face of mid-century anomie—the breakdown in public morality—both countercultures tried to strengthen social norms as well as revising them. Their reforms emphasized “ethics” and “values,” which fused with, or even replaced, politics. Notoriously, the two countercultures disagreed violently about military and reproductive “values,” which also fed the culture war.

“Family values” were—and are—the central culture war issue, actually. Both countercultures agreed that “traditional” families weren’t working as they should. The monist response was to dissolve or replace the model; the dualist counterculture tried to strengthen, support, and universalize it. During the subcultural era, American society reluctantly accepted a compromise allowing diverse sexual and family models, but upholding the “traditional” one as ideal.

Both countercultures recognized the value of local communities, which the systematic mode had eroded. Both invented new local community models: monist communes and dualist megachurches. Communes failed quickly; megachurches remain vigorous. The subcultural mode developed subsocieties as another new model for community, which unfortunately did not survive atomization. The atomized mode provides virtual but limited community through internet social networks. Overall, the problem of community is still mainly unsolved.

Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self

Pentecostal snake handlers
Pentecostal snake handlers↗︎︎ (Mark 16:17-18)

Rejecting rationality was the central conceptual move of both countercultures. Rationality was a foundation of the systematic mode. When the systematic mode conclusively failed, rationality got the blame.

Both countercultures explicitly abandoned rationality and adopted anti-rational religions: “Eastern” and “New Age” on the monist side; fundamentalist and charismatic on the dualist one. All these new religious movements discarded traditional social norms in favor of inner transformations supposedly wrought by “spiritual” practices.

Summary

In the systematic mode, you create a rational, systematic self↗︎︎. A systematic self has a clear boundary, so it is not flooded by the emotions and expectations of others. You act as the administrator of an internal world of principles, projects, and formal roles. A systematic self is far more sophisticated than a choiceless↗︎︎ one, and is a prerequisite to participating effectively in a systematic society.

Unfortunately, this sort of self is unnatural. Living as one sometimes exposes contradictions between systematicity and human nature. It can give the feeling of being a tiny cog in a vast, uncaring, meaningless machine—the “Iron Cage↗︎︎” of rationalized bureaucracy. When a society imposes systematicity rigidly, it becomes psychologically intolerable for many people.

The countercultures demanded to renegotiate the relationship between self and society. Both began by rejecting rationality, and the systematic principles, projects, and formal roles that rationality justified.

I defined countercultures as “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems.” The only distinctive part of this was the anti-rationalism.1 “New, alternative, universalist, eternalist, rational systems” had been tried repeatedly during the systematic era. These included, for instance, capitalism, communism, socialism, nationalism, fascism, democracy, Freudianism, and existentialism.2

The systematic mode used rationality to maintain eternalism↗︎︎: belief in fixed↗︎︎ meanings. Having abandoned rationality, both countercultures turned to religion as a foundation for eternalism. Mainstream Christianity had been rationalized in the 1800s, so the countercultures constructed alternatives: the New Age in the monist one, and a reworked Evangelical Christianity in the dualist one.

The countercultural religions developed ecstatic, quasi-magical, anti-rational technologies of self-transformation. These aimed to remake the self to strengthen it against the depredations of systematic society and—particularly in the dualist counterculture—to adapt it to better conform to systematic demands. They also promised emotional, social, and pragmatic this-world benefits, whereas traditional religion emphasized self-denial, devotion to God, and other-world salvation.

The two countercultures tried to solve many of the same problems, drawing from the same limited set of pre-existing cultural tools. Superficially opposed, they attempted many similar solutions. I find these similarities remarkable, but the point of this page is not to draw the interesting historical parallels. Rather: we mostly still have these same problems—although subsequent modes of meaningness↗︎︎ have contributed some additional tools toward solving them. Understanding the countercultures’ attempts, and how they failed, may help us now.

Overall, anti-rationalism was a disaster, I think. The self/society relationship did need extensive renegotiation—and still does. However, we can no longer live without rational social systems, and we are diminished as human beings if we lose the ability to create rational selves. The countercultures picked the wrong target, and the alternative, anti-rational systems they built were profoundly dysfunctional. When their failure became obvious, the modern world ended. We live in the wreckage, called “postmodernity.”

All is not lost. Rationality still works—just not as an ultimate↗︎︎ foundation. Rationality does not actually contradict meaningfulness, only eternalism. The fluid mode↗︎︎ needs to reclaim rationality, while recognizing its nebulosity↗︎︎ and limits.

The remaining sections of this page explain:

  • Why the countercultures rejected rationality: to rescue meaning
  • How they constructed new religions as alternate foundations: reviving Romanticism
  • The form of those new religions: subjective individualism
  • The religions’ promises to reform the self: to deliver unity, authenticity, and ecstasy
  • Their promises of material benefits: health and wealth
  • An assessment of their legacy: a disaster, but one we are recovering from

Rationalism and its discontents

Science: ruining everything since 1543

Rationality ruins everything. As you know. As everyone has known for hundreds of years.

Back in the choiceless mode, all things were charged with inherent meaning, mountains were inhabited by benevolent and terrifying gods, and you always knew what you were supposed to do. Then rationality came along and pointed out that meanings can’t be objective, there are no spooks, and you can’t derive ought from is. And the world was disenchanted↗︎︎, emptied of meaning↗︎︎, and turned into mere matter.

Charge of the Light Brigade

But wait! The heroic Romantics↗︎︎, on their magnificent steeds of poetry, mounted the counter-charge, plumes flying from their noble helms, against the machine guns of materialism. Meaning, they cried, was subjective, revealed by emotion, intuition, and aesthetic appreciation. We can re-enchant↗︎︎ the world in the mystic artistic unity of our True Selves↗︎︎ with Absolute Reality↗︎︎.

Alas, in mundane modernity, superior firepower defeats valor. The existentialists, seemingly the last ragged company of Romantics, fell, ignobly, in the late 1950s. Rationality demonstrated that meaning cannot be subjective either; Romanticism inevitably collapses into mere nihilism↗︎︎.

Meanwhile, rationality had turned its guns inward. During the first half of the century, rational certainty destroyed itself—in philosophy, mathematics, and science. Not only had it obliterated all other sources of meaning, rationality finally demonstrated its own meaninglessness.

Then what? asked the founders of the countercultures, in the 1960s. Rationality had been exhausted. All possible rational bases for systems had been tried, and had failed. Also, scientific rationality was apparently to blame for all the Twentieth Century horrors: the World Wars, loss of Christian faith, rampant materialism, ecological devastation, abortion, and nuclear weapons. Anyway, meaning obviously does exist, so if rationality says it’s neither objective nor subjective, it must just be wrong.

Reinventing religion: anti-rationalism as the cure

Well, this is easy! Reject rationality, and recover meaning from its most salient source: religion. (In fact, rational analysis shows that eternalism is wrong. If eternalism is misunderstood as the only defense of meaning, any serious attempt to rescue it must reject rationality.)

Unfortunately, Mainline Protestantism—America’s dominant religion—could not do the job. It had been modernized, remade for compatibility with the dictates of rationality, and thereby drained of most of its meaning. The 1920s fundamentalist vs. modernist↗︎︎ war was about this; the fundamentalists lost then. But they were right, in some sense. The modernists were on a slippery slope to secularism, and Mainline Protestantism became a hollow shell of hypocrisy, pretense, and going through the motions.

In the 1950s, religious commitment, despite its high levels, was superficial and largely a matter of vogue rather than conviction. Most self-proclaimed believers had little knowledge of the teachings of the Bible. To be a member of a mainline church was more a matter of adhering to convention born of the desire for social belonging. Churches were functioning mainly as social and civic clubs.3

So both countercultures constructed new, anti-rational religious movements to provide the meaningfulness Christianity had lost. The monist counterculture rejected Christianity in favor of “Eastern religion” and New Age nonsense. (Both these were mostly vintage-1800 German Romantic Idealism in disguise.) The dualist counterculture replaced rationalized mainline Christianity with anti-rational fundamentalist, charismatic, and dispensationalist alternatives.4

All these new religions promoted wacky mythologies: reincarnated space-faring priests from Atlantis bearing monist mystical wisdom; or the dispensationalist Tribulation and Rapture that separate the sheep from the goats. Such myths are defiant statements of anti-rationalism, putting you unambiguously outside the pale of the mainstream systematic worldview. Once you have publicly asserted your belief in holistic chakra rebalancing therapy, or young earth creationism, you are fully committed to simply ignoring everything rationality says. These “beliefs” are shibboleths that demonstrate your allegiance to the countercultural tribe, and rejection of the previous, systematic mode.

In this page’s analysis, what matters in the new religions is not their “beliefs,” but their practices.5 In particular, this page looks at the goals of those practices, which was to re-form the self, and to cure the body by curing the spirit. The efficacy of these quasi-magical technologies of personal transformation and faith healing was dubious. Having already committed to believing nonsense made it easier to go along with new absurdities.

Although the myths were untrue, they were at least partly functional in keeping new versions of systematic eternalism going. Despite anti-rationalism, the overall structure of justification was left largely intact in the countercultural mode. The countercultures were still more-or-less coherent systems, and still mostly made sense. As systematic reform movements, they retained legacy “becauses,” left over from systematic mode at its peak, and added new ones. However, there were now also unapologetic gaps that no one felt a need to fill, other than with emotional fantasies.

(Three decades later, in the atomized mode, structure finally disintegrated, coherence was lost, and nothing made sense other than in an emotional, associative way.)

The subjective turn and the end of “organized religion”

External, systematic duties are central to traditional religion. For 1920s fundamentalists, religious practice meant sitting on a hard bench, listening to sermons on ascetic morality, sin, and damnation. By the 1970s, nobody wanted that anymore.

The countercultures’ new religious movements were all about me. They took a “subjective turn,” toward internal personal mental states, particularly non-rational ones such as emotions and “experiences.”6 This was explicit in the monist counterculture; probably that is so widely known that I need not detail it here. On the dualist side, some Christian leaders resisted the subjective turn, but many adopted it covertly, and overall the Christian Right mostly succumbed in time. This is less well-known, so I’ll sketch some main aspects.7

The subjective turn accelerated centuries-old trends: Protestant interiority, Enlightenment individualism, and Romantic emotionalism. Especially the last: the countercultures developed a renewed Romanticism, which simply ignored rationality instead of fighting it. (I will trace the historical roots of both countercultures in Romanticism later.)

The religions of both countercultures downplayed objective, external moral criteria. They replaced rules and judgements with a view of ethics as flowing from the individual conscience, “being authentic to your true Self,” subjective feelings of compassion, and “doing what feels right in your heart.” And so: “Phrased in the language of psychology, sinfulness was discussed in terms of therapeutic maladjustment, rather than as the transgression of divine commands.”8

Countercultural Christianity retained some of the rhetoric of moral absolutism from its 1920s Fundamentalist roots. This seems to have been a major aspect of its appeal. There was much talk about Biblical inerrancy, and the Bible as the source of morals; but, for the most part, the counterculture was morally undemanding in practice.9 It placed an extraordinary, almost exclusive emphasis on sexual morality; and particularly condemned sexual transgressions of sorts that its adherents were unlikely to be tempted to.10 This enabled enjoyably self-righteous judgement of Those Horrible People In The Other Tribe (monist counterculturalists).

More generally, the specifics of traditional religion were unappealing, and so they were simply dropped. (This, at the same time the Christian Right was marketing itself as the guardian of tradition.) Subjective individualism was incompatible with Christian doctrine. Most supposed Christians were mainly ignorant of the basic tenets of their religion, and would reject them if they knew about them.11 So doctrine and liturgy were downplayed, with only a few key points retained.12

Subjective individualism was also incompatible with hierarchical authority and institutional traditions, so those disintegrated.13 This was consonant with the American individualism and Protestant anti-clericalism that had allowed for sectarian innovation for centuries. However, the countercultural era took it to new extremes: a “choose-your-own-Jesus mentality” or “cafeteria Christianity.”14

The innumerable Protestant sects had mainly defined their differences in terms of arcane details of abstract theology. Once everyone stopped preaching that stuff, the boundaries collapsed.15 Everyone hates “organized religion”, so countercultural Christianity developed a new social mode, featuring non-denominational churches; decentralized, unstructured communities; and ecumenical parachurch organizations whose lines of authority mimicked secular NGOs rather than traditional religious hierarchy. These achieved unprecedented economy of scale by appealing to Evangelical Christians regardless of sectarian affiliation. Generally, too, they gave people what they wanted, rather than demanding of people what traditional religion required.

Re-enchanting the self

Both countercultures saw the misery of modern life as due partly to inadequate selves. Both used religion as a therapeutic tool for re-forming the self to better cope. Both promoted personal transformation through magical, anti-rational, and supernatural methods. Both promised ecstatic personal fulfillment through direct experience of the divine. Both promised substantial material benefits, to be delivered after the self was properly restructured.

Both promised a better self, featuring self-actualization, self-affirmation, self-awareness, self-compassion, self-confidence, self-definition, self-discovery, self-esteem, self-expression, self-fulfillment, self-help, self-purification, self-realization, self-revelation, and self-transcendence.

Evangelicalism aligned Christian faith with the Holy Grail of the affluent society: self-realization. Unlike the classic bourgeois Protestantism of the 19th century, whose moral teachings emphasized avoidance of worldly temptation, the revitalized version promised empowerment, joy, and personal fulfillment. A godly life was once understood as grim defiance of sinful urges; now it was the key to untold blessings.16

In the face of the difficulty of conforming to an objective moral code, the countercultures sought to instill subjective compassion (for one’s own tribe, at least): an ethics of emotionalism. A moral person was now a happy, self-aware, psychologically well-adjusted one.

The Puritan virtues, required to conform to harsh external norms, were quietly dropped: self-abnegation, self-denial, self-discipline, self-doubt, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-surrender.

Promises of unity, authenticity, and ecstasy

The modern contrast between the systematic/public and communal/private worlds produced fractured selves, because you had to be different people in different contexts. Both countercultures sought to dissolve the public/private boundary, and to heal the divided self. In fact, they promised that the self could be unified altogether, replacing the broken ego with the True Self↗︎︎. That might unify even further: with the divine.17

This required supernatural technologies—which the countercultures promised to supply.

Where the systematic mainstream culture required hypocrisy, the countercultures promised authenticity. Where the systematic economy imposed brutal regimentation, the countercultures promised to restore spontaneity and freedom. Finding the authentic, spontaneous True Self was a major project,18 for which both countercultures offered magical tools.

In the face of the disenchantment of the world, and loss of religious certainty, the countercultures promoted ecstatic personal experience of the sacred.

Epistemologically, evangelical revivalism, with its reliance on the immediacy of the divine, faith in intuitive knowledge, pursuit of self-purification and holy living, and desire for a profound personal conversion experience, resembled closely the spiritual aspirations of the sixties movements. Rooted in transcendentalist and romantic conceptions of knowledge, countercultural thinking regarded truth as the result of intense, unmediated, and pre-rational experiences that dissolved the rationally constructed dualism of subject and object and revealed the unity behind fragmented existence.19

Both countercultures developed technologies for provoking altered states of consciousness, or intense emotional engagement, in which adherents found—or thought they found—access to the numinous.

Psychedelic drugs, understood as providing transcendent non-rational insight as well as orgiastic ecstasy, were hugely important in the development of the monist counterculture. The Human Potential Movement↗︎︎ turned the quasi-medical private practice of psychotherapy into quasi-religious public performances that resembled Christian revival meetings—and, increasingly, vice versa. The New Age offered consciousness transformation through endlessly diverse methods such as meditation, past-life regression, channelling, yoga, biofeedback, and self-hypnosis.

Before the Twentieth Century, Christianity was mostly about conduct and belief, not experience. This was very much true of American Fundamentalism, which is where the core leadership of the dualist counterculture came from. The idea of “religious experience” is Romantic, dating from the late 1700s, but it remained marginal in Christianity up to the 1980s. At that point, the fundamentalists reluctantly folded aspects of “charismatic” Pentecostalism into the new countercultural religion.

Charismatic Christianity features intensely emotional worship, emphasizing individual experience, spontaneous singing and dancing, and being “slain in the Spirit” (falling to the floor in religious ecstasy). It empowers supposedly-supernatural practices including “speaking in tongues,” divine healing, prophesy, exorcism and “spiritual warfare,” and (in some churches) miracles such as snake-handling and drinking poison without ill effects.20

Both countercultures fetishized concepts of a definitive, personal religious event. Supposedly this was an initial, overwhelming, dramatic, emotional religious experience, which lasts only a few minutes to a few days, but which sets in motion an unstoppable process of internal transformation. That is gradual and less intense, but spreads and deepens, and eventually results in a complete reconfiguration of the self that brings it into conformity with the Ultimate Truth or Cosmic Plan↗︎︎.

In the monist counterculture, this was often called “Enlightenment,” and supposedly came from some sort of “Eastern religion” like “Zen↗︎︎.”21 In the dualist counterculture, it was the “conversion experience,” “being born again,” or “baptism with the Holy Spirit.”22 In the mid-’80s, nearly half of Americans claimed to have been Born Again—probably even more than had been Enlightened.

Promises of this-worldly benefits

God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problem that arises, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves.23

Traditional religion mainly devalued the actual, material and social world, in favor of another, transcendent one, that might be reached in the afterlife or through mystical means. The religions of both countercultures paid lip service to transcendence, but marketed their pragmatic value in this world. Both countercultures promised that you could improve your material and social circumstances by reworking your self. De facto, they celebrated hedonism—within bounds—and (especially on the right) enthusiastic consumption of the fruits of the capitalist market economy.24

New Age quackery and Christian faith healing, both operating more on the soul than the body, could cure diseases without limit. Religions on both sides promised economic success through magical means.

Evangelicals increasingly identified with the materialistic and individualistic trajectories of American society. They abandoned the humility and self-doubt of their Puritan forebears for a therapeutic Christianity that primarily asked “what can God do for you?”

Christian practice became less associated with self-denial, awareness of sin, and tough moral codes than with health, business success, and self-esteem. Conversion came to mean psychological healing. Sermons explained how faith empowered people and helped them become more affluent and better integrated. Churches presented themselves as providers of spiritual and community resources for personal and family needs.

Lifestyle churches showcased religion as useful for personal and social ends, rather than as an expression of devotion to God. By emphasizing self-help, rather than sin and damnation, faith became a means of social adjustment in this life, rather than a preparation for life after death. The countercultural construction of the converted self matched the normative requirements of consumerist market society.25

Assessment: shooting the wrong horse

Rationality was never the problem with the systematic mode. The fault actually laid in eternalism. The countercultures attacked the wrong one. Founded on this misunderstanding, it is not surprising that the countercultural religions were mostly stupid and harmful. That said, they were honest efforts to solve serious problems, and their legacies are not all bad.

The countercultural project of resolving the disconnect between self and society mostly failed, at both ends. That is because it left intact the structure of their relationship, tinkering only with reforms in each separately. In fact, by exaggerating both individualism and collectivism, it made the conflict starker than before.

At the self end, religious leaders promised revolutions in consciousness that would bring about profound personal and social transformation. If many monist counterculturalists had succeeded in seeing through subject/object duality, and always acted from non-rational awareness of the connectedness of all things, then the Age of Aquarius might indeed be upon us. If many dualist counterculturalists had succeeded in accepting the infilling of the Holy Spirit↗︎︎, and always acted from non-rational awareness of the will of God, then the Rapture might indeed be imminent.

But this turned out to be mostly wishful thinking. Available consciousness-transformation methods were less powerful than hoped. Mostly, all the religions accomplished was a change in the contents of consciousness—“beliefs”—not in its structure or mode of being. Counterculturalists adopted some new mythology, and many enjoyed transient non-ordinary experiences brought on by drugs, conversion, or ritual. Few selves transformed significantly and durably.

Intelligent advocates of the countercultural religions—both monist and dualist—might say that they should not be judged by their least rigorous presentations, by populist distortions, or by the effects of their superficial appropriations by the clueless and uncommitted. I agree, if the criterion is the usefulness of the religion to a sincere and intelligent seeker. Thinkers from both countercultures offer valuable insights: Carlos Castaneda↗︎︎ and Francis Schaeffer, Starhawk↗︎︎ and Rick Warren↗︎︎.

However, here I am concerned with cultural history: the countercultures’ effect on the population at large. Some of that was beneficial:

  • In both countercultures, anti-rationalism legitimized temporary escapes from grim systemic regimentation, into ecstatic communal altered states.
  • Religious methods did help many counterculturalists develop greater psychological sophistication (even as many others regressed into pre-rational idiocy).
  • The “morality wars,” although profoundly harmful to American public discourse, made more people aware of meta-ethical questions, and helped some develop a more sophisticated ethical stance↗︎︎.
  • Some non-rational religious methods↗︎︎, pursued with sufficient tenacity, may indeed bring about significant, long-lasting change.

Overall, though, the countercultures’ anti-rationality and subjectivism undermined effective systematic understandings, methods, and institutions. (I assume readers of Meaningness understand why this was harmful, so I need not elaborate.)

Originally, both countercultures’ new religious movements attracted many intelligent, accomplished people, because they seemed to offer plausible solutions to the nihilism of the systematic mainstream. Gradually, smart people figured out that they were nonsense and left. As the countercultures faded, most other adherents shook off the silliest parts. By the mid-’90s, both the New Age and Fundamentalism were widely seen as “religions for losers↗︎︎.” This has somewhat limited the damage done.

Rationality after counterculturalism

In the next mode of meaningness↗︎︎, subcultures↗︎︎, having abandoned the failed quest for ultimacy and universality, did not need to take any particular position on rationality. Most neither reaffirmed rationality nor harmed it further. We’ll see, though, that subculturalism developed a new structural approach to the self/society mismatch. If fully implemented, it might make the value of rationality more obvious, and the emotional reasons for opposing rationality less compelling.

Tent in snow with disco ball
Now is the winter of rationality’s disco tent

Unfortunately, subculturalism failed, and our present atomized mode↗︎︎ abandons coherence altogether. Without any means for structuring relationships among ideas, rationality is impossible. This could eventually be disastrous. However, unlike the countercultural mode, the atomized one is not against rationality; just incapable of it.

I hope and believe there is an opportunity for the fluid mode↗︎︎ to reclaim a relativized, non-foundational rationality. The fluid mode explains that rationality is correct that meaning can be neither objective nor subjective, but points out a third alternative that preserves meaning and thereby avoids nihilism. Its meta-rational perspective appropriates rationality as a collection of often-useful, but not ultimate↗︎︎, tools for co-creating meanings.

  • 1. This wasn’t actually new. Both countercultures drew heavily on Romanticism, a major cultural movement of the 1800s, as a source of anti-rational ideas, inspirations, practices, and programs. I discuss this at length in “Countercultures: modern mythologies.”
  • 2. Freudianism is arguably non-rational, and existentialism is arguably non-rational plus non-eternalistic, although both could often fit my definition in practice. Both countercultures did borrow heavily from both Freudianism and existentialism—the monist one overtly, the dualist one covertly.
  • 3. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right↗︎︎, p. 36, lightly paraphrased.
  • 4. Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics↗︎︎ is a useful history of American Christian anti-rationalism in the past few decades. He writes from a center-right perspective, and takes the Christianity of the 1950s, rather than the 1970-80s, as his inspirational model.
  • 5. I’ll return to the “beliefs” in “Countercultures: modern mythologies”—not to debunk them, but to investigate meta-myths about the origins of the myths themselves.
  • 6. The term “subjective turn” comes from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age↗︎︎. There’s an excellent brief discussion in The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality↗︎︎ pp. 2-5; you can read it via Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature.
  • 7. See Countercultural Conservatives, p. 28: “The personalization of the religious message in evangelicalism constituted a shift from a concern with the proclamation of an objective and universal truth to a concern with the subjective applicability of truth, and thus embodied an alignment to the normative codes of modern pluralism… The emphasis on the individual in popular evangelicalism had its origin in the existentialist focus on subjectivity and the heroic rebel.”
  • 8. Countercultural Conservatives, p. 102. See also Smith and Denton’s Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers↗︎︎: “A significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten stepcousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism↗︎︎.”
  • 9. It is remarkable how willing the movement was to find ethical excuses for its leaders when they were caught snorting cocaine with underage male prostitutes. Such Christian forgiveness was also generally extended to the flock—so long as they publicly swore renewed allegiance to “traditional moral values” afterward. Bad Religion, p. 239, “Evangelical teenagers are more likely to have sex at an early age; Evangelical mothers are more likely to bear children outside marriage; Evangelical marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Catholics have more abortions than the national average.” And, p. 228: “The sense of harmony, unity, and communion that so many mystics experience can provoke a somewhat blasé attitude toward sin and wickedness, and a dismissive attitude toward ordinary moral duties.” See also Cultural Conservatives, p. 146: “While the Christian Right’s insistence on biblical absolutes reinforced its image as the defender of the true faith, it … produced less an assertion of traditional Biblicism than its reduction to generic moral exhortations.”
  • 10. See Weeden, Cohen, and Kendrick’s “Religious attendance as reproductive support↗︎︎” for much useful insight here. The central emphasis on specifically sexual sin was new as of the 1970s, not traditional. It’s notable also that the Biblical basis for opposition to abortion—the #1 moral teaching of the dualist counterculture—is somewhere between extremely scant and non-existent. “Pro-life” and “pro-choice” Christians both claim that a handful of Bible passages support their positions; but all of them, on both sides, seem obscure, oblique, desultory, and dubious. We need to look elsewhere for an explanation for anti-abortion sentiment.
  • 11. E.g.: “The great majority of active Baby Boom Presbyterians subscribe to neither the traditional Presbyterian standards contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter Catechism, nor to any of the more contemporary theological formulations espoused by their church.” Bad Religion, p. 77. “Eight in ten Americans say they are Christians, only four in ten know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and only half could name the four gospels.” Countercultural Conservatives, p. 33, calling this a “cycle of biblical illiteracy.”
  • 12. See Countercultural Conservatives pp. 28-33 and 124-5 for further discussion of the themes of this paragraph.
  • 13. “The era witnessed an extraordinary weakening of organized Christianity in the United States and a fundamental shift in America’s spiritual ecology—away from institutional religion and toward a more do-it-yourself and consumer-oriented spirituality—that endures to the present day.” Bad Religion, p. 62.
  • 14. Bad Religion, pp. 178, 181.
  • 15. This was taken to Perennialist extremes by the monist counterculture, which considered all religions interchangeable. It blithely mixed bits of Aztec myths, Daoism, and Sufism—as representative “wisdom traditions”—in a single sentence.
  • 16. Brink Lindsey, “The Aquarians and the Evangelicals↗︎︎,” Reason, Jun. 27, 2007.
  • 17. Kramer and Alstad’s The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power↗︎︎, p. 167ff, analyzes fundamentalism as a response to the divided self. It’s motivated by fear of internal anarchy; that without external restraint, you couldn’t maintain control over evil parts of yourself, which would run amok. Fundamentalism makes this pattern worse, by reinforcing ideas of internal evil and undercutting self-trust. However, surrender to it actually does (temporarily) end internal conflicts by tipping the internal power balance in favor of one part of the self against all others. This frees up a lot of energy, and in a social context creates powerful bonds with people who have made the same move.
  • 18. Not least because it doesn’t exist. The subcultural mode made a major advance in abandoning the quest for the unified True Self, and beginning to develop realistic methods for living successfully with a fragmented self.
  • 19. Countercultural Conservatives, p. 94. See further discussion there, p. 95 et passim.
  • 20. This has long sounded like big fun to me. I’ve avoided ever going to a Pentecostal service, for fear I’d abandon Buddhism.
  • 21. The “Zen enlightenment experience” was mostly invented by D. T. Suzuki, who got it from William James, who got it from the Eighteenth Century Christian mystic (and proto-Romantic) Emmanuel Swedenborg. See Robert Sharf’s “The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion↗︎︎” for discussion of this history, and for a useful deconstruction of “religious experience” in general.
  • 22. The phrase “born again” appears just thrice, obscurely each time, in the Bible. It was very rarely used before the publication of Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson’s remarkable 1976 book Born Again↗︎︎, and then-Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter’s public statement that he was “born again” a few months later. For an interesting discussion of the former, and the “conversion” phenomenon more generally, see Charles Griffin’s The Rhetoric of Form in Conversion Narratives↗︎︎. I suspect that the dualist countercultural understanding of the conversion experience leaned heavily on Romantic sources, but I haven’t traced this in detail.
  • 23. Smith and Denton, Soul Searching.
  • 24. As a Tantric Buddhist, I think this was a very wise move↗︎︎.
  • 25. This block quote is a mash-up of bits of text from several places in Countercultural Conservatives, edited for concision and clarity.

The personal is political

Protester drops a bra in the trash at the 1968 Miss America Pageant
Protesting the 1968 Miss America Pageant

The slogan “the personal is political,” originating in 1960s feminism, encapsulates both countercultures’ political agenda. Society had to change to accommodate the self; and political action was the way to reform the social structure.

Between them, the two countercultures shoved aside existing power dynamics and created reorganized coalitions which have dominated American politics ever since. Though both movements expired long ago, the struggle between them left a culture war that refuses to die.

A previous page, “Renegotiating self and society,” summarized the countercultures’ political program. The systematic mode↗︎︎ had imposed a hard division between self and society, which caused alienation, angst, and anomie. The countercultures addressed these problems by blurring the public/private boundary: the personal is political↗︎︎.

They sought to replace the artificial, seemingly-arbitrary social and personal requirements of the systematic mode with ones they considered natural. They tried to reorient society away from formal, systematic roles toward natural ones: family, unstructured friendships, and local communities. The monist counterculture thought humanistic, egalitarian norms would be more natural. The dualist counterculture thought godly, hierarchical norms would be more natural.

“Authenticity” meant bringing the private and public selves into alignment. This was the obvious response to the painful gap between them. However, it represents a partial reversion toward the choiceless mode↗︎︎. Systems can be unjust, inhumane, rigid, dysfunctional, or outright inimical to human survival. Unfortunately, we still don’t know how to live without them. The choiceless mode feels right but it can’t feed a world of billions of people. The countercultures mostly recognized this, and did seek only to replace existing systems, not to return to a pre-systematic state.1

Merging ethics, politics, religion, and identity

Both countercultures unified politics and morality: the public and private manifestations of “ought.” Merging them helped collapse the self/society boundary. This led to a massive revision of American political, class, and religious systems—as we’ll see in the next page.

The countercultures perceived anomie↗︎︎: a breakdown in morality due to broad recognition that public norms were discordant with private values. Both called for a reform of social norms to bring them closer to ethical norms, and for norms to be strengthened—that is, better enforced against wrong-doers.

Power struggles between economic interest groups were the heart of politics before the countercultures. Conflict between the working class majority and the bourgeois minority drove the main ideological movements, and threatened social collapse. Counterculturalists recognized that such conflicts have no “right” resolution. Everyone may honestly believe their group should win, but that’s nothing more than self-interest.

Eternalism↗︎︎ demands an ultimate↗︎︎ answer to political questions: there must be an unambiguously correct, clear, simple solution once you see it. A contest of selfish brute political force won’t deliver that. Ethics—a force beyond self-interest—must provide the right answer for politics.

Of course, the countercultures disagreed sharply on some ethical questions. So how do we know that our ethics are right, and theirs are wrong? Religion. Religion gives transcendent, unchallengeable justification for ethical claims. And so both countercultures merged politics with religion, as well as with ethics.2 Not only did they reform politics along religious lines, they also turned their politics into pseudo-religions.

Spiritualizing politics, and politicizing everyday personal interactions, was not an altogether bad thing. Sometimes ethical considerations should trump power politics. Sometimes political considerations should alter personal behavior. However, combined with eternalism (absolutism) and universalism (intolerance of diversity of views), the merger has poisoned both politics and everyday life.

Countercultural politics split Americans into two warring tribes. Lack of distinctions between ethics, politics, and religion is a main cause of the bitterness of culture war. When politics is inseparable from morality, your political opponents do not just have different economic incentives, they are evil: immoral, sub-human, demonic. That makes negotiation and compromise impossible.

As politics came to define what it meant to be a good person, many came to define their selves by membership in one counterculture, and rejection of the other. Political success would require solidarity, and both sides promoted the “brotherhood of all counterculture participants.” However, identification with the monist or dualist tribe eventually proved to be an inadequate basis for self.

The monist personal was political

Pro-choice rally
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Dave Bledsoe

The New Left↗︎︎ was the monist counterculture’s political program. The Old Left had mainly promoted the economic interest of the working class. The New Left mainly promoted a middle-class personal morality, and mostly lost interest in working class and economic issues.3

Monist politics addressed the crisis of the self: the problems of alienation, angst, and anomie. It started from an improbable synthesis of Marxism, Freudianism, and existentialism—the most important secular systems of meaning in the mid-twentieth century. These systems utterly contradict each other, and also contradict central tenets of the New Left. However, countercultural intellectuals somehow combined them in an ideology of complete liberation of the individual from social norms. Given this incoherent and absolutist origin, it’s not surprising that many of the New Left’s social proposals were simplistic utopian fantasies.

Loosening social norms

In the beginning, the New Left sought mainly to loosen existing social norms, rather than to replace them. The 1950s had been a period of unusually rigid expectations for conformity, which counterculturalists found intolerable. Many of these norms seemed arbitrary, or obsolete, or simply served the selfish interests of elites. Just throwing them off would be a good start. The monist counterculture was, at first, remarkably anti-authoritarian.

After some experience of the consequences of moral breakdown, the counterculture shifted to advocating social reform based on new norms. These were supposed to be more human and natural, in contrast with the industrial, artificial norms of the systematic mode. Leaders intended to create a supportive and egalitarian society. Not everyone got with the program immediately. So, New Left organizations increasingly demanded “discipline,” and monist culture increasingly insisted on correct “consciousness.” The left gradually left behind its New anti-authoritarianism.

Sexual liberation

Sex is perhaps the most personal and private of activities. Before the countercultural merger of the public and private spheres, sex would never have been considered a “political” issue.4

“Victorian morality” was still the official public ideology of sex and family life in the 1960s. For decades, it had been increasingly ignored↗︎︎ in private—the very definition of hypocrisy and anomie. Improved contraceptive technology and safe, effective treatments for all the STDs of the time removed rational justifications for restrictive sexual norms.

Herbert Marcuse↗︎︎ was probably the most important New Left theorist. His Eros and Civilization↗︎︎ rejects Freud’s pessimistic conclusion in Civilization and Its Discontents↗︎︎ (which I discussed previously) that the self, particularly its sexual desires, must be subordinated to the social system. Modern political repression, Marcuse argued, is based on sexual repression. For the New Left, the sexual revolution↗︎︎ was inseparable from the struggle against oppressive corporations and an oppressive state.

This program was partly successful. By the mid-1970s, when the monist counterculture petered out, a majority of Americans had adopted a much more liberal sexual morality than was publicly acceptable in the early ’60s.

Family

The counterculture considered the Victorian family oppressive for all participants, and set out to dissolve it.

For children, they said, the family was a training ground for a future role as subordinates in an oppressive society. The family’s purpose was to create “authoritarian personalities.” Victorian family theorists had made this entirely explicit: children must be taught unquestioning obedience to arbitrary parental authority in order that they will make “good citizens” as adults. New Left theorists believed this explained the acquiescence of the German and Russian people to Nazi and Stalinist oppression. Families make fascists. In America, families turned out obedient employees, cogs in the machinery of capitalism, whose childhood resignation to emotional abuse also made them joyless, compulsive consumers.

The demand that all men marry and support a wife and children doomed many to an onerous and unwanted breadwinner role. The Beat movement—prologue to hippies—was largely a revolt against work, which implied a revolt against marriage. Hippie men too wanted to sleep around, get high, and listen to music—not spend all their time in a mind-destroying job in order to pay for children they hadn’t asked for.

Hippie women were, likewise, mostly not looking forward to a lifetime stuck at home washing dishes and changing diapers. On the other hand, many discovered that the new social norm that they should have sex with any hippie man who wanted them was not so great either. Some did have children, and then hippie rejection of breadwinning became a problem.

Meanwhile, many more-mainstream women found they enjoyed their careers, and relished the freedom from dependency on men a paycheck gave them. Second-wave feminism↗︎︎ began as their political program to end workplace discrimination. Feminism is now hazily remembered as part of the ’60s counterculture, probably because they were lumped together as enemies by the dualist counterculture. The reality was more complicated: feminism was long resisted by most male leaders of the New Left, and of the monist religious and cultural movements.

Community

The Victorian isolated nuclear family ideal was called “traditional,” but it was only a century old. Anthropologists pointed out that it is culturally unusual. Extended families are more typical. These are usually closely woven into broader clans and villages. Children are normally raised by many adults. Unmarried teenage girls also do much of the work, keeping small children out of adults’ hair, and buffering them from excessively harsh parental discipline.

Marcuse, and other countercultural theorists, advocated dissolving nuclear family bonds and replacing them with extended social networks.

Hippie communes put this theory into action. They address both the problem of work and the problem of family. To avoid work, we all move to a remote farm, where we’re out of reach of The System, and we grow all our own food and make everything else we need.5 There we get back in touch with the cycles of nature, live life on a human scale, and do just enough wholesome, meaningful work to meet our own needs—instead of slaving for capitalist exploiters. We hold property in common, so everyone has everything they need. We raise children communally, so they always have many loving adults to turn to.

In almost every case, this ends disastrously, usually within a year or so. The founders have high-minded cooperative ideals, but no one actually wants to plow the field, wash the dishes, or feed other people’s children—and if work is not enforced, gradually everyone does less. (This is especially true of communes whose promise is freedom from work!)

Worse, in the absence of strong social norms, communes attract parasites: freeloaders and sociopaths. The brotherhood of all counterculturalists implies that anyone with long hair can come live on the farm. Soon a lot of long-haired guys show up who expect to be fed and laid and supplied with drugs, in exchange for doing nothing. Often they are surly or even violent as well. We are very nice cooperative egalitarian monist people, and they invariably have some sob story for why they can’t be expected to pull their weight, so none of us wants to tell them to get out. No one even feels they have any authority to do so. After a few months, the productive members of the commune give up and leave; and then so do the parasites, when the free food, sex, and drugs run out.

Communes that succeed have strong social norms. Living there requires high commitment to specific values, beyond the countercultural ones. They are mainly interested in being left alone to do their specific thing, rather than trying to impose it on society at large. These make them subcultural↗︎︎, not countercultural. Unfortunately, during the countercultural era, successful communes mainly ended up being dominated by charismatic authoritarians (who had the gumption to toss out the parasites) and became exploitative cults. Others, more benign, were run by leaders with strong organizational skills, who imposed formal roles and systems and found a profitable non-agrarian economic basis for their community.

The “brotherhood” fantasy, that the counterculture as a whole could function as a community, was a clear failure. Mostly its egalitarian ideals undermined even attempts to create local communities.

The dualist personal was political

Pro-life rally
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Wikipedia

Social conservatives, as well as liberals, found the systematic mode’s private/public split intolerable. It enabled pervasive moral hypocrisy, for instance in the form of “Sunday Christians↗︎︎,” who said the right things in public, but whose private lives were unaffected by religion. Your public and private lives must match to make you an authentic Christian. This is what “born again” meant to many: that you walk the talk.

A godless society makes that walk hard going. There were plenty of sinners in the ’50s, but at least mainstream society expected basic Christian morality. By the mid-’70s, atheists and perverts had taken over America. Hollywood and universities and the government, and even many supposedly Christian churches, all promoted sin. The dualist political program was a grassroots uprising for basic decency, for religious freedom, for taking America back to the traditional values of its founders. (Or so its leaders said.)

They cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, as one of the main reasons for launching their counterculture. The Court’s reasoning in this case was based on the right to privacy: affirming the public/private distinction. The personal, said the Court, was not political.

The founders of the Moral Majority—the foremost dualist-counterculture political organization—were also motivated by their disappointment at “born again” President Jimmy Carter’s rejection of “the personal is political.” Carter refused to publicly oppose abortion despite his private conservative Evangelical religious beliefs.

With the Supreme Court and the President advocating moral hypocrisy, a counter-cultural politics was imperative. The dualist political program worked to collapse the public and private in order to return society to natural, godly norms. This project complemented the dualist religious movement’s technologies of the self, which strengthened souls against the temptations of the new hedonism, nihilism, and atheism.

Large-family values

Dualists agreed with monists that the “traditional family” was not working. They wrote the opposite prescription, though: it should be strengthened and supported, not dissolved.

“Family values” was the central dualist counterculture slogan. For liberals, the list of issues this covers is puzzling. It seems senseless and disparate, and mostly to have nothing to do with families, although weirdly obsessed with sex. If there is any common theme, perhaps it is “don’t enjoy yourself!”—and it is hard to see how that is anything other than mean-spirited.

Social conservatives seem incapable of explaining “family values” other than in Biblical terms. Such justifications are nonsense, because social conservatives ignore most Biblical prohibitions, and they only started caring about the main “family values” in the 1970s.6 Before then, conservative Protestants mostly thought abortion was fine. Sodomy had always been a sin, but an obscure one; fundamentalists had been far more concerned to preach against drinking, dancing, and gambling. The “family values” agenda must have some other, powerful, unstated motivation. Baffled liberals may attribute it to pure malice: hatred rooted in innate evil.

I’ve recently come to a tentative, alternative understanding that makes me much more sympathetic.7 If we take the dualist political agenda as promoting large families, its specific positions suddenly make sense. In fact, conservatives do have significantly more children than liberals, on average.

Three reproductive strategies have been common in America in the past half-century:8

  1. Opportunistic mating without marriage, and with minimal parental investment—especially, minimal support by fathers. This is most common among the underclass and lower working class.
  2. Early marriage (teens or early twenties); many children, starting shortly after marriage; emphasis on life-long monogamy; and high total parental investment, spread over many children. This large-family strategy became typical mainly of the upper working class and lower middle class.
  3. Marriage and children delayed to late twenties or into the thirties in order to accumulate resources (university education and establishing a career); multiple sexual relationships before marriage; fewer children; highest per-child parental investment. This is typical of the upper middle class.

The “family values” agenda makes sense when interpreted as promoting the large-family, early-marriage strategy as against both of the others. As a political movement, it attempts to get the government to support its reproductive strategy, and to hinder, prohibit, or punish the others.

Take abortion, the foremost issue of the religious right.9 Those pursuing the early strategy have little use for abortion, because they intend to have lots of children as soon as they can. On the other hand, unintended early childbirth ruins the delayed strategy by interrupting education or professional career development. Before legal abortion, it forced many women to abandon their life plans altogether. It set many men back in their careers as well, because to support an unwanted child they had to maximize current income, instead of pursuing education or prestigious but low-paid training positions. Conversely, if you are currently unable to support children at all—often true for those who adopt the opportunistic strategy—abortion may be pragmatically necessary. If we assume that sabotaging the opportunistic and delayed strategies are the point of the anti-abortion movement, its moral condemnation of both “welfare queens” and “selfish career women” makes sense.10

The large-family, early strategy requires enormous personal sacrifice. If you have six children, then realistically one parent does have to stay home, taking care of them all day every day. Many people enjoy caring for children, but doing it almost your entire adult life, with little time to enjoy or express yourself, is a long hard grind, and emotionally restricting. Financially, in addition to per-child costs, the family has to give up on the potential second income. There is less parental attention and less money per child than in smaller families; preparing and paying for college may be infeasible, for instance. For the employed parent, the financial stress and responsibility, the risk of catastrophe if you lose your job, and the impossibility of taking time off, are equally grinding.

Social liberals should recognize that sticking to this plan, in the face of constant temptations to irresponsibility, is genuinely noble. Religious conservatives congratulate themselves on being “moral” because they are “godly.” Liberal atheists should recognize that they are moral: not because they follow the Bible, but because they work extremely hard, for the sake of others, in difficult circumstances, when they do have alternative options.

In fact, because the big-family strategy is so grueling, it needs intensive memetic support. For many people, switching to strategy 1 (abandoning your wife and children, having an affair, getting high instead of cleaning the house, spending money on something fun the family can’t afford) looks attractive all too often. It is easier, more enjoyable in the short run, and might seem rational for the longer term, too. Constant reminders of absolute, eternalistic↗︎︎ religious justifications help keep you on the straight and narrow. A community—a church—that reinforces the message with social confirmation and peer pressure, checking every week to see that you have not gone astray, is invaluable. And, the Christian technologies of the self were designed to make the large-family strategy more emotionally bearable.

The delayed, small-family strategy is the most personally rewarding, for those capable of it. However, it only makes sense if you have something better to do with your twenties. That means college, and the kinds of jobs that require eighty-hour-a-week work at low pay during your twenties in exchange for prestige or a very high salary later: entry-level positions as an academic, doctor, lawyer, or investment banker.11 Mostly, these are inaccessible for young people from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. If you are going to work forty hours a week on low-skill jobs for the rest of your life, you might as well have children when you are twenty.

On the other hand, if you are not capable of earning enough money to support a wife and children, strategy 2 is out of reach, and you are stuck with reproductive opportunism.

So it is not surprising that the religious right was—and still is—rooted in the upper working class and lower middle class.12 And this explains its sudden emergence in the 1970s. Economic changes during the 1960s made strategies 1 and 3 both work better than they had. Increased workplace opportunity for women, general prosperity, and more generous welfare support made strategy-1 single motherhood much more feasible and attractive than it had been. Increasing subsidies for college tuition, plus a widening gap between blue-collar and professional/managerial salaries, made the delayed-marriage strategy 3 both easier to access and more attractive.

This meant that people pursuing the large-family strategy saw greater competition from the others than previously. It also meant many were tempted to switch. That could be threatening in several ways. At a practical level, as an example, for a man, it was more likely that your wife would leave and support herself. (This is why wives’ obedience and dependency were so heavily promoted, and why conservatives oppose workplace equality.)

Psychologically, the shifts caused great cognitive dissonance. Strategy 2 had been the best option for most people for decades—but maybe now it wasn’t? Surely I made the right decision—but now the others look better? What can it mean, when fundamental life choices change out from under you? This provokes confusion, resentment, and uncertainty. Anti-rational religious claims were a relatively effective treatment. You could take pride in doing what was religiously right, at great cost, even though it might seem senseless otherwise.

In fact, over the past few decades, many have shifted away from the early-marriage, large-family strategy. Some have moved in the direction of delay. Conservatives have smaller families than they did—although on average they still have almost one more child than liberals. Many send children to college—despite the discrimination conservatives may face↗︎︎ there. On the other hand, economic trends that started in the 1970s have accelerated, making it ever more difficult to raise a family on a single working-class income. Many have despaired, given up, and slid into strategy 1—which may seem like total failure.

If this strategy analysis of social conservatism is right, its eternalistic↗︎︎ religious rhetoric is a smoke screen. The “family values” agenda is just self-interested: it tries to harm competing social classes and benefit its own. The large-family strategy it promotes is not “more moral”; it is good for some people and bad for others. Forcing it on the underclass—“you can’t have children unless you have a steady job and stay married”—means they will fail, and be eliminated as competition. Forcing it on the upper middle class—“you can’t have sex unless it results in children, and mothers have to stay home to care for them”—eliminates much of their advantage.

Still, this understanding of what they are up to makes me more, not less, sympathetic to social conservatives. They are not just being irrationally hateful. Pursuing self-interest, and moralizing it to conceal selfish motivations even from oneself, is universal. It can’t be condemned.

Also, from this perspective, one can see sexual liberalism as mainly self-interested politicking for strategy 3. Getting to sleep around, while waiting to have children until you’ve gotten your professional degree and established your career, makes your twenties tolerable.

The core of the monist counterculture was college-educated, middle class people in their twenties. Some went back to the “straight world” in their thirties, pursuing the delayed strategy. Some “dropped out” permanently and defaulted to the opportunistic strategy. You can view their contempt for “traditional marriage” as merely a self-interested attempt to harm those pursuing strategy 2.

Indeed, while sexual freedom is functional for some people, the change in social attitudes since the ’60s has been devastating for others. I find plausible arguments made by Charles Murray, in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010↗︎︎, and Theodore Dalrymple, in Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass↗︎︎. The loosening of social norms, particularly around sex, drugs, and family, which originated in the monist counterculture and which is propagated by the leftish upper middle class, has been catastrophic for the working class. Millions who might have led decent early-marriage strategy-2 lives have slipped instead into the underclass: destructive drug addiction, permanent unemployment, crime, child neglect and abuse.13

Dualist community

The monist counterculture’s Romantic fantasy of community was the rural commune. One reason those failed was that most hippies were from middle-class urban backgrounds, and had no clue how to start a balky tractor, snake a drain, or slaughter a hog. The core of the dualist counterculture came from the rural working class, for whom such things are everyday tasks. If only they had been able to cooperate!

In fact, “Jesus freaks↗︎︎”—Charismatic Christian hippies—formed some of the most successful communes. Their Jesus Movement↗︎︎, which predated the main dualist counterculture, was an important bridge between the two, working out ways hippie innovations could be adapted for use by Christian conservatives.14

The dualist counterculture appealed particularly to people from rural backgrounds who experienced culture shock when they moved to cities and office-park suburbs for work. The main dualist fantasy of community was an idealization of “traditional” small-town life—“traditional” meaning “all the good stuff with none of the bad.” Despite much talk, the counterculture had no credible program for fixing rampant rural social pathology, so this was no more realistic than the hippie commune movement.

Churches were centers of the dualist counterculture. Church community can provide substantial material support, in addition to the memetic and social support I mentioned earlier. However, existing church institutions were inadequate. The counterculture innovated extensively in sermons and service style, music, management structure, marketing, architecture, and social ministries.

The most successful new-model churches grew explosively into megachurches↗︎︎, a qualitatively new form of social organization. Like the few successful communes, these became subsocieties: local communities with a distinctive subculture that served a wide array of social needs. This was far more functional in practice than “traditional small-town life.” Hoping to reform small towns nationally was a characteristically countercultural project; megachurches are a subcultural one. Therefore, I will discuss them in detail in the next chapter, rather than here.

Upshot and aftermath

In the end, neither counterculture had a workable program for reforming the self, or society, or for renegotiating their relationship.

Although the proposals of both countercultures were extreme, neither was sufficiently radical. Both left intact a structure of individuals and a nation-scale society confronting each other across an unbridgeable gap. Both merely fiddled with details on either side of the chasm, rather than proposing a fundamentally different approach to the problems of individualism and collectivism. This is a major reason the countercultures failed.

Their social proposals were simplistic and utopian. Social liberalism is not right. It is good only for some people. Social conservatism is also not right; just good for some people. The fact is, different sorts of people need different social arrangements, including different sexual, family, and community norms.

Later I will argue that this was the fundamental error of the countercultures: universalism. Both tried to impose their preferred way of life on everyone else. However, neither way was accepted by a majority, let alone everyone.

This failure brought out totalitarian tendencies in both countercultures—particularly the dualist one. Totalitarianism, too, makes the personal political and seeks to destroy the boundary between a social system and individuals. It would take extreme state repression to force everyone into a uniform code of sexual morality. Imposing an early-marriage large-family strategy is, indeed, a central project of Islamism, a totalitarian dualist counterculture.15 Fortunately, in America, both countercultures grudgingly accepted their democratic failure, with only minor terrorist violence from extremists on each side.

Although neither counterculture’s political program was adopted in full, both partially succeeded in transforming American government, law, and social norms. (More about that in “Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise.”) Both caused considerable harm to society and to individuals, but also had some benefits.

Making explicit that the self/society boundary needed softening and reworking was a helpful step toward the subcultural mode. The conflict between the countercultures made clearer what the problems of self and society are. It made some people aware that social systems are contingent constructions, not absolute truths, so we all have a responsibility to help them evolve. Although both countercultures were eternalist↗︎︎, most people found themselves somewhere in the middle, which made eternalism, monism, and dualism less credible. That too set us up for the subcultural mode’s move away from all three of those confused stances↗︎︎.

Subculturalism developed structurally new models of the self, of society, and their relationship:

  • Acknowledging the fragmentation of the self as inevitable made it increasingly unproblematic.
  • Acknowledging diversity (including diversity of moral views) allows like-minded people to form distinctive subsocieties. This provided a layer of organization intermediate between the family and the nation-state.
  • Thus, the extreme ideals of existentialist individualism (the one-pointed self perfectly separated from social influence) and totalitarian collectivism (the boundaryless self entirely dissolved in social conformity) both lost their appeal.
  • 1. There were exceptions, particularly in the monist counterculture. Monist movements like anti-capitalism, anti-rationalism, eco-primitivism, the Noble Savage mythos, and the back-to-the-land movement would have destroyed systematicity altogether if actually carried out. The dualist counterculture’s alliance with the big-business Republican right mainly forestalled similar moves, although its fringier anti-rational elements could have been equally catastrophic if they had gained power.
  • 2. One manifestation: Christian Voice, the second-most-important Christian Right organization, issued influential “Morality Ratings” on every member of Congress, based on their support or opposition to its legislative agenda.
  • 3. Although the New Left was officially Marxist and anti-capitalist, it had no substantive economic program. Its supposed anti-capitalism was mainly actually opposition to the emotionally unfulfilling “iron cage↗︎︎” of employment in big-business bureaucracy; to the responsibility of private industry for environmental destruction; to the military-industrial complex’s promotion of unnecessary wars for profit; and to the inadequacy of government anti-poverty programs. The counterculture was not seriously opposed to a market economy, and was mainly enthusiastic about consuming its bounty of nifty new goods.
  • 4. From the Victorian era forward, do-gooders had campaigned against masturbation and prostitution. Though these campaigns were public, their objects were private, and therefore considered matters of “morality,” not “politics.”
  • 5. Communal agrarian self-sufficiency is a persistent, malign Romantic fantasy. Brook Farm↗︎︎ was a hippie commune of the 1840s which failed in just the same way as the ones of the 1960s. The Utopia Experiment↗︎︎ describes another attempt ten years ago, which followed the same script again. (This one led by an academic expert on, among other things, the existential risk posed by runaway artificial intelligence.) The underlying fantasy is that the choiceless mode would be paradise. The reality is that it is awful in material terms, even when its human relationships feel more natural.
  • 6. I put “conservative” and “traditional” in quotes for this reason.
  • 7. This model was inspired by sociological research by Jason Weeden and his collaborators. See, for instance, “Religious attendance as reproductive support↗︎︎,” “Sociosexuality vs. fast/slow life history↗︎︎,” and “Churchgoers are restricted individuals in fast groups↗︎︎.” My discussion here is not an accurate summary of Weeden’s views, and he might disagree with it. However, if it includes any useful insights, they are mostly his.
  • 8. These are not the only possible strategies. For example, extended families sharing a single home were mainly extinct in America by the middle of the twentieth century. Polygamy had been banned a century earlier. Both are common elsewhere, and more traditional than the “traditional marriage” promoted by “conservatives.” DINK—dual income, no kids—is an increasingly popular non-reproductive strategy.
  • 9. I could give similar analyses for the other “family values” issues—drugs, pornography, prostitution, feminism, homosexuality, divorce, and so forth. However, I’m not trying to give a detailed account of social conservatism here, just a sketch of a possible explanation of its principle and function.
  • 10. As with any major movement, different people oppose abortion for different reasons. Some have genuine sympathy for fetuses, or genuinely believe that the Bible forbids abortion. However, these moral and religious concerns can’t explain why most Protestants thought abortion was fine until the mid-’70s, before suddenly making it their central political issue. Many abortion opponents do explicitly connect it with “welfare queens,” “sluts,” and “selfish career women,” consistent with a class-based reproductive-strategy analysis. It’s worth noting also that opposition to abortion partly replaced opposition to contraception, which was only made fully legal in America in 1972, by the Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird↗︎︎.
  • 11. Plausibly one reason such professions underpay their entry-level positions is to screen out anyone who would prefer strategy 2 to 3—the lower-middle-class riffraff we don’t want in our office.
  • 12. Of course, it has never been entirely restricted to those classes. In fact, one impetus to the 1980s dualist counterculture was the upward mobility of fundamentalists, from the rural working class to the suburban technical middle-middle class, particularly in the Sunbelt defense industry.
  • 13. Of course, economic changes that have disadvantaged the working class are also major factors.
  • 14. See Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right↗︎︎, pp. 101, 131-4, et passim.
  • 15. Islamism was founded by Sayyid Qutb, after spending two years in America, 1949-51. His horror at American sexual openness↗︎︎ seems to have been a major inspiration for the movement. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.”

Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise

Galleon tilting on giant wave
Galleon courtesy↗︎︎ George Grie

I write this during the 2016 American presidential election campaign, which portends a massive political realignment. The two countercultures of the 1960s-80s created stable party coalitions that persisted for decades. This year, they are breaking up.

Understanding where these coalitions came from may help understand how they have functioned, why American politics is so polarized, and what may happen next.

The countercultures redefined the American “left” and “right” from economic to “values” ideologies. Politics shifted from arguments about pragmatic policy questions to fights over meaningness↗︎︎ itself. The Democratic and Republican Parties repositioned themselves as champions of monist and dualist countercultural values, respectively. This polarizes American politics irresolvably.

The countercultures’ political realignment created a new, two-track social class system. It’s personally useful to understand social class better, because it motivates so much of what we all do; but it is also always funny, because we work so hard to hide that from ourselves.

Left and right vary in meaning

In any particular time and place, political affiliation tends to range along a single continuum, which gets labeled left to right. However, “left” and “right” mean quite different things in different places and eras. Ideologues often claim that “what left and right really↗︎︎ mean is”—whatever serves their argument. However, political scientists agree that there is no defining issue or axis that consistently distinguishes the two. In American politics, left and right have been redefined several times.

During the countercultural era, the New Left and New Right replaced the Old Left and Old Right. My previous page analyzed the goals of these New movements in cultural terms. Here I look at their implementation in electoral politics.

American first-past-the-post voting rules force a two-party system.1 For many issues, there are more than two possible choices; and groups who agree on one topic may disagree on another. These facts imply that the two parties must always assemble incoherent coalitions of interest groups, somehow held together to cover roughly half the voters. When the sizes of groups change, or a group changes its party affiliation, the system becomes unstable, and new coalitions must be organized.

My account of the countercultural realignment is not a general theory; it is about a specific period in American history. There were partly similar political realignments in some other places around the same time. However, the details of the American rotation were unique, and some key events were just accidental.2 The realignment was driven partly by judicial and legislative actions that granted black Americans voting rights in practice, not just theory. It was also driven partly by economic changes, specifically the growth of the middle class.

So, a “rotation” might have occurred even without the countercultures. However, the parties seized those as powerful, coherent cultural ideologies that could hold together new electoral coalitions.

The Great Rotation

Two diagrams summarize the change. The first illustrates the meanings of “left” and “right” as of 1960:

The American political landscape as of 1960

The main political division was between economic classes.3 The Old Left, and the Democratic Party, represented the working class. The Old Right, and the Republican Party, represented the middle and upper classes. The working class was the majority, and the Democrats had dominated elections↗︎︎ for several decades.

Religions aligned with economic class, and with politics.4 The Mainline Protestant denominations were middle class and Republican. Catholics, Fundamentalists, Charismatics, and other “sects” were working class and Democrats. Religious people identified primarily with their denomination, and were hostile to denominations that had significantly different theologies.

During the countercultural era, the main political division “rotated clockwise,” as indicated by the dashed arrows in the diagram above.5 By 1980, “left” and “right” had new meanings:

The American political landscape as of 1980

The new politics of meaning was primarily a division within the middle class, who were now an electoral majority.6 The New Left mainly promoted social freedoms and the social rights of non-economic demographic groups (race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.). It explicitly disclaimed interest in the working-class economic concerns of the Old Left.7 The New Right mainly promoted a “large-family values” agenda, despite its alliance with business groups.

Religion realigned along with politics:

  • The New Right, invented by Fundamentalists, united highly-observant religious people of all religions, denominations, and sects. The three leaders of the Moral Majority were a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew. That was a deliberate statement that all religious conservatives share key moral values, so arcane theological disputes should be put aside.8

  • The New Left united everyone else: atheists, agnostics, “spiritual but not religiousmonists↗︎︎, and Christians who didn’t go to church, or didn’t let God get in the way of a normal life. That last category included a majority of Mainline Protestants.

The new two-track class system

The broad prosperity of the 1960s defused the economic class conflicts that had dominated politics from the beginning of the century. For the middle class, social status became more important than income, because everyone in the class had everything they really needed. Americans’ class was increasingly determined by their cultural values, rather than by income.

Social status came to be largely a matter of mouthing counterculturally-correct opinions. I wrote about this at length in “Ethics is advertising↗︎︎”:

The countercultures split the American middle class into two hostile tribes. Members of both considered anyone in the other tribe inherently immoral. With us, or against us! To be minimally acceptable as a human being, you had to demonstrate commitment to the correct side.

The middle class developed parallel social status ladders. You climb one of the ladders by demonstrating skill in conforming to, and expressing, either monist or dualist values.

To count as a member in good standing of the monist (“left”) tribe, you needed to have the correct opinion about hundreds of issues. You had to like tofu, Bob Dylan, Cesar Chavez, and Tom Robbins, and to hate nuclear power, Dolly Parton, Ronald Reagan, and the Moral Majority.

To be upper middle class, you need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what would be the correct opinion about things that are new to you. This requires conceptual sophistication: years of study not only of details, but also of ways to think. That is what a liberal arts education used to be for.

The great thing about the new system is that everyone in the monist middle class could consider themselves superior to everyone in the dualist one, and vice versa. Morally, at least, and that’s what counts in the new class system. Suddenly, everyone was above average!

Unfortunately, to maintain above-average status, everyone on each ladder has to constantly reinforce their belief in the worthlessness and moral degeneracy of everyone on the other one. This is one reason the culture war is so bitter and intractable. We fear that if it ended, we’d have to go back to measuring our self-worth in dollars, rather than political correctness.

Also unfortunately, making “values” a major determinant of social worth created an endless negative-sum signaling competition↗︎︎ for position on each ladder. This game is negative-sum because the main signaling techniques involve conspicuous wastes of time and cognitive effort. Also, of course, the whole culture-war “values” game is negative-sum because it’s actively harmful to social cohesion and sensible government.

One of the best innovations of the subcultural mode↗︎︎ was to create a panoply of small status hierarchies, so we could ignore the social status and signaling efforts of everyone outside our subculture. This is much healthier for individuals, but unfortunately it allowed Generation X to drop out of political involvement. That meant the Baby Boomers’ destructive culture war persisted long after the death of their countercultures.

Meanwhile, the culture war was cheerfully coopted by consumer capitalism. Income does still contribute to your position on the middle class ladder, even if it does not determine it. Every conceivable category of consumer product comes in monist and dualist versions, at a full range of price points. You can precisely signal which ladder you are on, and how high up, by what you fill your house with.

I do most of my shopping in Reno, Nevada. Reno has two upscale malls, a monist mall and a dualist mall.9 The monist mall is anchored by an Apple Store; the dualist mall is anchored by Scheels, which sells thousands of guns from a showroom floor the size of half a football field.

Mac Pro

At the Apple Store, for $9,827.00 you can get a fully-spec’d Mac Pro↗︎︎ with a 12-core Xeon E5 processor, 64GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, and dual D700 FirePro GPUs with 12GB of GDDR5 VRAM. That’s 7 teraflops of crunch, and you’ve got 528 GB/s of memory bandwidth. You can drive eight streams of 4K video in real time. It’s plenty powerful enough to do 3D animation and post-production for major studio films.

The Dalai Lama advertising Apple computers

That’s insane, nobody needs a computer like that at home. Anyway, Apple doesn’t even make real computers. Just pansy-ass crap for kids and art fags, promoted by the Dalai fucking Lama.

Hey, maybe I’ll make an indie video game hit and make a squillion dollars. Don’t think I couldn’t do it! I’d need a computer like that.

Barrett 82A1 rifle
Barrett 82A1 image courtesy↗︎︎ Heavennearth

At Scheels, for $12,371.99 you can get a fully-spec’d Barrett 82A1 rifle↗︎︎ with an ATACR 5-25x56F1 scope↗︎︎. The semiautomatic 82A1 fires .50 BMG↗︎︎ heavy machine gun rounds. It’s accurate at 1800 meters, and .50 BMG will go through brick and concrete walls, or destroy a truck’s engine block. The US military uses it in anti-materiel applications: you can take out an aircraft, in a closed hangar, with a single shot.

Various rifle cartridges including .50 BMG
The .50 BMG, at the left, with conventional rifle cartridges for comparison.
The second-largest, the .300 Win Mag, is a standard for big-game hunting and for military and law-enforcement sniper rifles.

That’s insane, there’s no conceivable civilian use for a thing like that. Assault rifles are bad enough, but gun nuts can at least pretend they are going to use them for hunting or “self-defense.” Why do we let these fucking fascist-wannabe rednecks buy military heavy weapons?

Hey, maybe there’s going to be a major terrorist attack, or a civil uprising. Don’t think it couldn’t happen here! I’d need a gun like that.

Gun display
Scheels showroom floor

Counterculturalism, rebellion, and authority

The mainstream power structure resisted replacement, so both countercultures adopted the stance↗︎︎ of romantic rebellion↗︎︎. “It’s the system, man!” was the hippie explanation for everything wrong with the world. Or, as the New Left called it, “The Establishment↗︎︎.”

Romantic rebellion is not supposed to succeed—success isn’t romantic, it’s practical. But the mainstream was so rotten that it caved, both times, within a few years, making counterculturalists the new Establishment. That left them with no mainstream to rebel against. They had to resort to rebelling against each other, or to denouncing “The Establishment,” which was now themselves. This was ridiculous, and has made a dysfunctional mess of politics ever since.

The monist counterculture was initially highly anti-authoritarian and anti-Establishment, but as it gained power in the Democratic Party, it had to become less so. Its descendent, the current American left, abandoned anti-authoritarianism long ago, and is comfortable using government power to redress perceived social injustices.

The right was traditionally the party of the established order, even though the Republicans had mostly been out of power since the Great Depression. The right’s opposition to the monist counterculture was initially conceived antidisestablishmentarianistically, as preserving traditional institutions against long-haired drug-fueled barbarians. However, by the mid-1970s, a series of liberal Supreme Court decisions—Roe v. Wade (abortion), Bob Jones University (racial segregation in religious schools), and Engel v. Vitale (prayer in public schools)—plus the expected ratification of the ERA (women’s rights)—made it obvious that the system had been seized by perverts.

The New Right organized as a response to these outrages. Allegiance to the Establishment was no longer tenable. Thenceforth, the Republican Party too positioned itself as a radical insurgency against a corrupt establishment. And as the left became increasingly authoritarian, the right could claim increasingly plausibly to be the party of individual liberties.

Decades later, powerful politicians from both parties campaign “against the government” and denounce “Washington insiders.” Such absurdity has had dire consequences for the quality of governance.

The Forever War, and its end

Shifting political conflict from economic to “values” issues lowered the stakes, but pumped up the rhetorical viciousness. Politics can often find reasonable compromises, or even win-win solutions, to economic contests. The Great Rotation created an endless holy war of dueling eternalisms↗︎︎:

  • The countercultures’ “values” are, supposedly, sacred religious principles↗︎︎, on which compromise is unthinkable.
  • The justifications for the values of each side are metaphysical, and make no sense outside the monist or dualist worldview, so arguing with the other party never goes anywhere.
  • In reality, the “values” are mainly tribal shibboleths and claims to personal identity and self-worth—which also resist compromise.

There is a mainstream theory of American political change that says political party realignments occur roughly every 36 years↗︎︎. This is explained by generational replacement. Some political scientists date the last realignment↗︎︎ to 1968 (about when the Rotation started); some to 1980 (when it was complete). If you believe in the magic number 36, and start from 1968, we are long overdue. This could be explained in terms of Generation X mostly sitting politics out. Alternatively, if you start from 1980, we’re right on schedule for a major realignment this year (2016).

In any case, I see a current shift to politics in the atomized mode↗︎︎. In “The new politics of meaning,” I called this “the politics of incoherence.” The atomized mode is native↗︎︎ for Millennials, and electoral power is passing now from the Baby Boom generation to the Millennials. (Generation X is too small ever to dominate the electorate.) Later, I will discuss atomized politics↗︎︎, as a cultural phenomenon, in detail. How it will function in a two-party system, I cannot currently guess. It includes what I call an “echo counterculture war”; but atomization’s incoherence suggests this cannot persist after the passing of the Boomers.

I hope Generation X, who will be taking institutional leadership from the Baby Boomers over the next decade, will drop the culture war, and can provide adequate structure to keep atomization’s worst consequences at bay.

  • 1. This is called Duverger’s law↗︎︎.
  • 2. According to Frank Schaeffer, who was personally responsible for making abortion a major political issue, and who was extensively involved in the creation of the Religious Right, the Evangelical-Republican alliance was an unplanned and mistaken marriage of convenience that only occurred because a couple relatively minor players happened to hook up. Also, the Southern Strategy was brilliant and necessary in retrospect, but it developed more by empirical observation than rational planning, and was opposed by much of the Republican Party.
  • 3. Left vs. right did not line up perfectly with economics, of course, and there were major political disagreements other than economic ones. Both parties were somewhat incoherent coalitions of convenience before the rotation, just as after. Also, the political alignments of individuals and of groups were generally less coherent, and less polarized, then than now.
  • 4. In fact, both before and after the rotation, religion was the best demographic predictor of American political affiliation, according to polling data.
  • 5. The details of how this happened, in terms of shifts in voter demographics and electoral calculations by the Party leadership, are fascinating in a geeky way. I am resisting writing about that here, because it is well-documented mainstream political history. If you are interested, you could start with the Wikipedia articles on the Fifth Party System↗︎︎, which was the pre-rotation alignment; the Southern Strategy↗︎︎, which returned the Republican Party to power by gaining the votes of the white rural working class, formerly the core of the Democratic Party; and the Sixth Party System↗︎︎, which is the post-rotation alignment. I’ve also written in some detail about the formation of the alliance between Evangelicals (previously majority Democrats) and the Republican Party in the mid-’70s. Theorists disagree about exactly when the Fifth System ended and the Sixth began. I think it was gradual, from about 1964, when the Republicans first gained support among white Southerners opposed to black civil rights, to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.
  • 6. A middle class majority meant economic class couldn’t be the basis for a two-party system, which needs a roughly 50/50 split. Put a different way, the Democratic Party had to make a new ideological appeal to the middle class, because its working-class base could no longer keep it in power. The party chose to back monist values, including women’s and racial minority rights, which had previously been Republican issues. That then allowed the Republican party to draw away working-class and lower-middle-class dualists from the Democrats.
  • 7. This was the main point of C. Wright Mill’s Letter to the New Left↗︎︎, one of the movement’s key founding documents.
  • 8. Conservative Christianity, post-rotation, became largely non-denominational. Given that its leaders had, since the 1920s, wasted most of their energy on vicious sectarian battles over incomprehensible metaphysical minutiae, this was a startling and welcome development.
  • 9. Actually, the dualist mall is in Sparks, which is the real Nevada. It’s just across the Truckee River from Reno. Reno is infested with tax exiles from California, so it’s got weird stuff like sushi.

Countercultures: modern mythologies

Steampunk airships battle in the sky
The Airship Battle, courtesy↗︎︎ Tom McGrath

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The two countercultures invented fantastical time-distortion mythologies to confuse future and past. Both created nostalgia for imaginary golden ages, which were actually hoped-for (but implausible) futures. Both promised upcoming utopias that were actually tired fantasies from long ago.

Both countercultures assembled their conceptual frameworks from pieces of several old systems of meaning—most of which were long-discredited, for good reasons, and which clearly contradicted each other. They needed to hide that behind appealing origin myths.

Both countercultures assembled their core membership from several disparate subcultures. To weave them together, they needed big-picture unifying themes, leading to a glorious vision of a shared future. The two themes they selected were monism↗︎︎ and dualism↗︎︎; and so they spun stories of harmonious monist and dualist societies to come.

The monist counterculture appealed to neophilia and promised innovation; the dualist counterculture appealed to neophobia and promised a return to tradition. Neither delivered. In fact, we’ll see, on the whole the monist counterculture took more from the past, and the dualist one was more inventive.

Both, however, drew primarily on the Romantic movement of the 1800s, which was the first to grapple seriously with the defects of modern systematicity, and to propose a renegotiation of the relationship between self and society.

Both countercultures promoted absurd “object level” myths—part of the content of their cultures. These included, for example, the founding of the New Age by Mayan and Tibetan priests and the defeat of the Great Beast at Armageddon. These fables—of the monist and dualist countercultures, respectively—were not seriously meant to be believed.

The countercultures also promoted “meta-level myths,” which you were meant to believe. These were myths about the sources and nature of the countercultures themselves. You were meant to believe that the monist counterculture had a radical new vision for society, culture, and self. You were meant to believe that the dualist counterculture was a seamless continuation of traditional Christianity, as it existed before the perversions of the 1960s. Both these meta-myths were mainly false.

According to Lyotard’s original explanation of postmodernity↗︎︎, meta-myths are the essence of “modernity,” or what I call “the systematic mode. (He called them “grand narratives.”) As modernity’s failure loomed, the authors of meta-myths became increasingly frantic, and their creations increasingly fantastical. The countercultures deluded themselves about their own nature, and that is part of why they failed.

The countercultures were the last phase of modernity, and the subcultures↗︎︎ the first phase of postmodernity. The subcultures abandoned all grand narratives, and instead created playful mythologies that you were not supposed to believe. Sky battles between steampunk airships are not credible—but they are fun! I will suggest that such transparent mythologizing is a key resource for the fluid mode↗︎︎.

Fundamentalism is countercultural modernism

Fundamentalism claims to be traditionalist, and opposed to modernity. It is actually modernist, and opposed to tradition—and to postmodernity.

Burqa with full niqab is not traditional in most Muslim cultures
Traditional dress for Muslim women varies widely by culture, and details are not prescribed by scripture

Fundamentalism remade hundreds of millions of people’s mode of relating to meaning↗︎︎ when it exploded out of obscurity four decades ago. Any account of the future of meaningness must, at minimum, understand fundamentalism as background. The Christian version is still hugely influential in America, although waning. Islamic fundamentalism is the worst memetic threat the world faces currently—although I will suggest it too is on its way out.

Misunderstanding fundamentalisms as “traditional” and “anti-modern” makes it impossible to respond coherently. Recognizing them as modern, anti-traditional, and anti-postmodern is the necessary starting point for understanding.

This page explains how fundamentalist movements:

  • are modern in the sense of “recently invented”
  • are modernist in the sense of providing a systematic structure of justification
  • arise because traditions can’t defend against “why?”; only modernist systems can
  • are anti-traditional in rejecting cultural specificity in favor of abstract universalism
  • are anti-traditional in rejecting complex customary beliefs, practices, and institutions in favor of someone’s new and radical explanation of a supposed clear and simple Ultimate Truth
  • are countercultural: “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems”
  • originally opposed rational modernity but now mainly oppose postmodernity, i.e. the end of the possibility of systematic eternalism↗︎︎
  • require extremism because modernity is over and eternalism can no longer work
  • are failing, and being replaced with atomized↗︎︎ postmodern alternatives.

I sympathize with fundamentalists: postmodernity has frightening defects and dangers. I end the page by recommending that religious people find other, more effective strategies than fundamentalism for opposing postmodern threats to meaning.

Fundamentalism is modern

Fundamentalism is just over a century old. The word “fundamentalism” itself was coined only in the 1920s. It was also only in the 1920s that fundamentalism became a significant force—and then only for a few years, before going underground for decades.

World War I (1914-18) was a profound shock for eternalist↗︎︎ certainty in meanings. Social, cultural, and psychological systems began to disintegrate. Fundamentalism seemed to promise their restoration; and this accounts for its 1920s popularity.

However, the movement began just before WWI,1 as a reaction against↗︎︎ “modernist” theology. This explains why it still claims to be anti-modern, although that was (we will see) not exactly true in the 1920s, and became altogether untrue in fundamentalism’s second phase, beginning in the 1970s.

Modernist theology developed in the late Victorian era as a response to the twin challenges posed to Christianity by Darwinism and historical criticism of the Bible. The modernists’ goal was to adapt Christianity to the new scientific and historical consensus, and to maintain the relevance of faith in an intellectual climate suddenly grown dismissive of the authority of Scripture. To this end, they stressed ethics rather than eschatology; social reform rather than confessional debate; symbolic and allegorical interpretations of the Bible rather than more literal readings.2

The 1920s fundamentalists rightly recognized that Christian modernism was a slippery slope to humanism, secularism, atheism, and nihilism. Half a century later, starting in the late 1960s, the modernist Mainline Protestant denominations imploded. They had eliminated nearly everything from religion except ethics, and then adopted mainstream secular ethics, and so had nothing distinctive to offer anyone.

Fundamentalism suffered a grievous blow in 1925 when its prosecution of the Scopes “monkey trial” (over the teaching of evolution) made it look ridiculous to most Americans. It retreated into a marginal subculture for many decades.

A second wave of fundamentalism emerged in the 1970s, as the innovative memetic core of one of the two great countercultures. This was another period of visible shakiness in the systematic mode of meaningness↗︎︎. The “hippie” monist counterculture challenged mainstream systems, with surprising success. It was also a time of rapid cultural globalization; the mass media suddenly exposed Americans to unfamiliar images and ideas from afar. Within the West, the postmodern era was just beginning—“postmodern” here meaning the condition in which all systems have been discredited. Fundamentalism again offered a bulwark of certainty against the disintegration of meaning.

Islamic fundamentalism has a similar history. Although it has roots in 1700s Wahhabism, the movement began only in the early 20th century, and remained mainly marginal until the 1970s, when it formed the innovative memetic core of the Islamist counterculture. The same pattern holds true for Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist fundamentalisms.

Fundamentalism is modernist

Fundamentalism describes itself as traditional and anti-modern. This is inaccurate. Early fundamentalism was anti-modernist, in the special sense of “modernist theology,” but it was itself modernist in a broad sense. Systems of justifications are the defining feature of “modernity,” as I (and many historians) use the term.

The defining feature of actual tradition—“the choiceless mode”—is the absence of a system of justifications: chains of “therefore” and “because” that explain why you have to do what you have to do. In a traditional culture, you just do it, and there is no abstract “because.” How-things-are-done is immanent in concrete customs, not theorized in transcendent explanations.

Genuine traditions have no defense against modernity. Modernity asks “Why should anyone believe this? Why should anyone do that?” and tradition has no answer. (Beyond, perhaps, “we always have.”) Modernity says “If you believe and act differently, you can have 200 channels of cable TV, and you can eat fajitas and pad thai and sushi instead of boiled taro every day”; and every genuinely traditional person says “hell yeah!”↗︎︎ Because why not? Choice is great! (And sushi is better than boiled taro.)

Fundamentalisms try to defend traditions by building a system of justification that supplies the missing “becauses.” You can’t eat sushi because God hates shrimp↗︎︎. How do we know? Because it says so here in Leviticus 11:10-11.3

Secular modernism tries to answer every “why” question with a chain of “becauses” that eventually ends in “rationality,” which magically reveals Ultimate Truth. Fundamentalist modernism tries to answer every “why” with a chain that eventually ends in “God said so right here in this magic book which contains the Ultimate Truth.”

The attempt to defend tradition can be noble; tradition is often profoundly good in ways modernity can never be. Unfortunately, fundamentalism, by taking up modernity’s weapons, transforms a traditional culture into a modern one. “Modern,” that is, in having a system of justification, founded on a transcendent eternal ordering principle↗︎︎. And once you have that, much of what is good about tradition is lost.

This is currently easier to see in Islamic than in Christian fundamentalism. Islamism is widely viewed as “the modern Islam” by young people. That is one of its main attractions: it can explain itself, where traditional Islam cannot. Sophisticated urban Muslims reject their grandparents’ traditional religion as a jumble of pointless, outmoded village customs with no basis in the Koran. Many consider fundamentalism the forward-looking, global, intellectually coherent religion that makes sense of everyday life and of world politics.

Fundamentalism is anti-traditional

Traditional culture is a colorful muddle of customary, local beliefs and practices. The diverse styles of traditional women’s clothing from different Muslim societies, in the illustration at the top of this page, is a fine example. Lacking a system of justification, there is no basis for arguing that other people’s customs are wrong.4

Fundamentalism rejects cultural specificity in favor of abstract universalism. There can only be One Ultimate Truth, which must be the same everywhere, so women everywhere must wear the same clothes. Fundamentalism dismisses actual traditions as “inauthentic” on the pretext that they are degenerations from the authentic, original religion, which fundamentalism claims to represent—thereby inverting the actual order of history.

Traditional cultures have a structure of authority: if you want to know what God wants, you ask a priest; and he knows because he was told by an older or superior priest. There are sometimes quarrels over who gets what position in the hierarchy, but the structure itself is unquestioned and so requires no justification.

Fundamentalism rejects customary authorities in favor of a supposed clear and simple Ultimate Truth. It says the traditional hierarchy is “corrupt” and must be swept away. The structure of justification should replace the structure of institutional authority. Fundamentalism is hostile to ritual↗︎︎, because that reinforces traditional authority rather than simply expressing the Truth.

Sayyid Qutb’s 1964 manifesto Milestones founded modern Islamic fundamentalism. The book’s central claim was that Islam had been entirely extinct for several centuries. All existing “Islam” was actually Jahiliyyah, “paganism,” because (he said) it was not based on Shariah. Or at least not the true Shariah, which only he could discern. All existing fake-Islamic institutions must be destroyed by violent jihad. Somewhat less dramatically, “the absence of strong traditions and institutional ties in [American] Evangelicalism, and its high level of organizational mobility, made it a distinctly modern phenomenon.”5

The Ultimate Truth is to be found in the scriptures, supposedly.6 But the scriptures are pervasively vague, self-contradictory,7 and say lots of things fundamentalists want to ignore. So fundamentalists claim special interpretive insight that gives them the authority to determine what scripture really↗︎︎ means. But “this is where the basic contradiction between fundamentalism and true tradition lies. There is no tradition that permits the individual or group, solely on the basis of its own assertion, to proclaim its own knowledge to be infallible and absolute.”8

Fundamentalism is countercultural

Fundamentalism, everywhere, became a significant cultural force only during the countercultural era (1960s-80s). In America, 1970s fundamentalism claimed to be a reaction to the hippie/monist counterculture, which was partly true. However, there was no monist counterculture in the other places where fundamentalisms burst forth, at about the same time. In fact, modern fundamentalism is mainly a reaction to the disintegration of secular systematicity. Each second-wave fundamentalism arose as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to hold meaning together in the face of postmodern nihilism↗︎︎.

Recall that I defined a counterculture as a “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational system.” I’ve explained how the American “Moral Majority” counterculture of the 1970s-80s fit this definition. Here I’ll briefly point out how fundamentalisms in general are countercultural.

Fundamentalisms are new (and anti-traditional) because they are recent and innovative. I’ve described American fundamentalist innovations in “Rejecting rationality, reinventing religion, reconfiguring the self” and “Countercultures: modern mythologies.” I gather the fundamentalists of other religions are similarly inventive, but don’t know details.

Fundamentalisms are all oppositional (alternative) by nature. The early-20th-century ones opposed modernist branches of their religions. The post-1970 ones originated as political responses to secular political authorities. Recently, fundamentalists have taken control of some states; but they continue their oppositional attitude even when they exert totalitarian power. Having vanquished the internal enemy, they organize their rule—rhetorically, at least—around jihad against religious enemies outside their state.9

Fundamentalisms are all universalist, claiming that their Truth applies equally to everyone, and so everyone must behave the same way.10 Fundamentalisms are all eternalist↗︎︎: they claim every tiny thing has a definite meaning, given by the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎, of which they have unquestionable knowledge and understanding. Fundamentalisms are all anti-rational: they oppose secular rationality, and claim to ground all meaning in non-rational transcendent revelation, as given in scripture. They are all systems, in the sense of networks of justifications.

Fundamentalism is losing to postmodernity

Fundamentalism was originally devised as a weapon against liberal Christian modernism: one system of meanings to fight another system of meanings. In the mid-1970s, it was re-deployed as a weapon against two other systems of meanings: the anti-rational monist counterculture and secular rationalist modernism. But, by that point, all three enemies were already dying at the hands of a fourth, more powerful force: postmodernity.

“Postmodernity” means simply that no eternalist system can work any longer. Starting from about 1980, we live in a shattered world: navigating storm-tossed seas among fragments of meaning, mixed up flotsam and jetsam of numerous broken systems. All eternalisms are defenseless against postmodern skepticism.

So, we need to find ways to live without them. Some people built new, smaller, sea-worthy boats—the post-eternalist subcultures—and adapted to postmodernity reasonably well. (At least until atomization↗︎︎ hit.) Others—those who found postmodernity most difficult—turned to fundamentalism, for its promise of certainty, of solid dry land. They hoped to preserve a world that makes sense, against the firehose torrent of jagged insanity spewed by the media, and now the internet.

If you understand the defects and dangers of postmodernity, you can sympathize, even if not actually agreeing. Unfortunately, fundamentalism doesn’t work; it can’t work. The deluge is global, and there is no terra firma anywhere.

Most fundamentalists don’t understand the difference between secular modernism and postmodernity. Mostly, they are stuck fighting the last war, with the wrong weapons, against a dead horse. In America, it is way too late to oppose evolution, or sex violence and nasty noises in music, or liberal bias on broadcast TV, or even abortion. Postmodernity doesn’t care about any of that. (Increasingly, conservative Millennial voters say that they don’t consider abortion an important issue.) In fact, polls in the past few years show a sharp decline in fundamentalism, especially among younger, more-atomized, generations. Older fundamentalists recognize, resentfully, that they have lost the culture war.

Third-world fundamentalisms think they are fighting “Western influence,” “neo-colonialism,” or even “Christian crusaders”; but actually the enemy is the atomized global culture, which is as much Asian as Western, and far more capitalist than colonial or Christian. The West can adapt to the breakdown of systems of meaning because we had well-functioning systems for a couple centuries, and spent the twentieth century figuring out why they can’t work anymore. Left behind by modernity, and then by postmodernity, much of the third world never had a working systematic mode, and so now doesn’t understand why that can’t work. As in the West in the 1930s, the obvious response is to try to make eternalism work by force. Fundamentalism and totalitarian nationalism—fused in every third-world version—are attempts. As these fail, they become ever more desperate, and therefore ever more extreme and violent.

ISIS fighters including young Australian recruit

Islamic extremism—originally devised as a coherent system—is atomizing. The things young Islamists say and do make no sense in any conceptual framework, traditional or modern, Islamic or Western. Many Millennial-generation Islamists know the global internet culture↗︎︎ better than they know Islam. They are not fundamentalists—following a religion based on scripture—just extremists.

In an upcoming page↗︎︎, I’ll explain how ISIS, the “alt-right,” and “tumblr SJW” all promote politics in the atomized mode—just as the Yippies↗︎︎ and the Taliban both pursued politics in the countercultural mode. Since ISIS is pretty much the worst thing in the world now, understanding how this works may be important to fighting it. I’ll suggest strategies for memetic warfare↗︎︎.

My advice to fundamentalists (and others)

As a highly religious person, although not a fundamentalist, I share your concern. The atomization of meaning could result in complete cultural and social collapse.

I suggest that you identify your enemy clearly. If you want to preserve your meanings, you need to come to grips with atomizing postmodernity, which is the current reality, instead of wasting your effort fighting obsolete modernisms.

I suggest that it is more important to find ways of preserving some coherent meanings than fussing about details. I would rather see a competent fundamentalist theocracy that kept civilization running than an anti-systematic social collapse—even though you would burn me as a witch↗︎︎ in the first week after you took power. I hope you would prefer living in a competent atheist rationalist state that kept civilization running than see an anti-systematic social collapse—even if it banned all public practice of religion.

“How do we rescue meaning from nihilistic atomization?” is a more urgent question than whether God exists. Scriptural literalism has definitively failed. You and your former secularist enemies might do well to join forces. I realize a fundamentalist-atheist alliance sounds implausible—but before Francis Shaeffer united them in the 1970s, the idea that fundamentalist Protestants, conservative Catholics, and Orthodox Jews would join to fight secularism sounded absurd.

Ross Douthat, a conservative but not fundamentalist Christian, sees a “postmodern opportunity.”11

The Christian gospel originally emerged as a radical alternative in a civilization as rootless and cosmopolitan and relativistic as our own. There may come a moment when the loss of Christianity’s cultural preeminence enables believers to recapture some of that original radicalism. Maybe it is already here, if only Christians could find a way to shed the baggage of a vanished Christendom and speak the language of this age.

“Radical orthodoxy” and the “emerging church” movement are attempting to rebuild Christianity from the ground up—bypassing failing institutions, avoiding culture-war flashpoints, and casting the faith as a lifeline for an exhausted civilization rather than just a return to the glories of the past. Both have a particular interest in reaching the urban, the academic, and even the cool—which points to the possibility of a kind of revolution from above, in which our cultural elite is reconverted and the country comes along.

  • 1. One cannot say exactly when a movement began; that is generally somewhat nebulous↗︎︎. You can trace antecedents as far back as you like; fundamentalism does take inspiration from Luther’s sola scriptura. It would be reasonable to say it began with the publication of The Fundamentals, which became the movement’s manifesto, in the 19-teens.
  • 2. Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics↗︎︎, p. 27.
  • 3. “And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcasses in abomination.”
  • 4. This doesn’t mean traditional cultures are particularly tolerant, just that they don’t use systematic logic to denigrate each other.
  • 5. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right↗︎︎, p. 28.
  • 6. Alternatively, in capital-T Traditionalism↗︎︎, the Ultimate Truth is manifest in monist↗︎︎ mystical revelation. Capital-T Traditionalism is almost perfectly parallel to fundamentalism, except that its religious core is monist rather than dualist↗︎︎. The “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s-70s was also monist, and Traditionalism manages to combine some of the worst features of both the American countercultures. Perhaps because it’s bizarre and repellent at first glance, Traditionalism has had limited success. However, Sedgewick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century↗︎︎ argues that it has significantly influenced Islamic extremism. Currently, it is also influential in new Russian and Eastern European far-right movements.
  • 7. Genesis 9:3: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” How about shrimp?
  • 8. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity↗︎︎, p. 162. This book casts considerable light on fundamentalism; see my summary here↗︎︎.
  • 9. My guess is that, in each case, state jihadism will gradually become less effective as a way of motivating and controlling the populace. That seems to have happened in Iran, which was the first fundamentalist state.
  • 10. Or, at minimum, everyone within a large religious, national, or ethnic group. Many versions of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism claim dominion over everyone in the world; Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist fundamentalisms may only demand obedience from all Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists.
  • 11. Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics↗︎︎, pp. 278-80.

Counter-cultures: thick and wide

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The extraordinary accomplishment of the two countercultures of the 1960s-80s was to create new, serious, distinctive, positive approaches to all aspects of life.

Countercultural culture was wide, in addressing every imaginable topic, and in appealing to a broad audience—ideally, everyone. It was thick, in that its treatment of any given topic was substantial, dense, a significant innovation, and woven into one of the two great countercultural themes (monism↗︎︎ or dualism↗︎︎) via its structure of justifications.

This contrasts with subcultures↗︎︎, which were narrow: able to address only a few aspects of life, and intended only for a small specific segment of society. As the subcultures progressively fragmented↗︎︎, they also became increasingly thin: they lost the critical mass of creativity needed to develop innovative, deep meanings.

Countercultural culture also contrasts with imploding systematic culture that preceded it. That suffered from a profound loss of confidence, and from a split between “high” culture and “popular” culture. “High” culture had been property of the social elite, but turned against its masters, as the anti-bourgeois artistic avant garde. By the 1960s, that had degenerated into knee-jerk negativity and empty simulations of creation, “a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable individual trademark, a succession of manifestos of despair.”1 Meanwhile, “popular” culture was mainly trivial; and so neither could provide thick meanings. Nihilism↗︎︎ seemed a plausible consequence of the loss of the meaning-defining classical high culture of the systematic mode↗︎︎ at its zenith.

The countercultures deliberately addressed that nihilism by creating new cultures as serious, positive mass alternatives. This is perhaps the most valuable legacy of the countercultural era.

The countercultures obliterated the obsolete high/pop distinction. Their new art started from popular forms, but also borrowed from the avant garde. Overall, it had greater depth, heft, sophistication, and broad appeal than either.

Some miscellaneous points I will cover

I defined the countercultures as “new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational systems.” I noted that rejecting rationality was the central conceptual move of both. Anti-rationality was the key to their contribution to the arts.

Hallucinogenic drugs, whose effects are anti-rational, inspired the monist counterculture’s psychedelic art movement.

This theme goes back to the Romantics, though. They too deployed art as an antidote to the dehumanizing effects of modern employment. The monist counterculture drew heavily on Romantic precedents.

The monist counterculture, particularly, harnessed the creative energy of an entire generation into a thematically coherent culture. The Boomer gonzo attitude of throwing oneself totally into a scene, take-no-prisoners, contributed to its enormous power output. This had good and bad effects. It resulted in unprecedented cultural progress, but also a lot of harmful idiocy, and lasting bitter conflict.

I don’t need to go into any detail on the content, because it’s still omnipresent and familiar. Teenagers today still listen to ’60s bands, half a century later—just as they have in every intervening decade. I won’t be surprised if they still do in another half century. Teenagers have not listened to pop music from the 1940s since the 1940s, and never will again.

One legacy: you can buy almost any product—whether a physical good or a service—in monist or dualist branding. As a random example: holistic dentistry↗︎︎ and Christian dentistry↗︎︎. Also, heavy metal.

Everyone in the monist counterculture listened to every genre of popular music. This was consistent with monism, and universalism: music was no longer divided by race, class, ethnicity, or religion. Most subcultures↗︎︎, by contrast, organized around single musical genres. The atomized mode↗︎︎ abandoned that again; and now everyone listens to anything. Like this atomized masterpiece, probably the most sublime achievement of Western Civilization:

Why both countercultures failed

Breakup of the galleon Girona
Wreck of the Girona courtesy↗︎︎ Notafly

The universalism of the countercultures was their fatal flaw.

No single system of meaning can work for everyone—or even for most people. Both countercultural visions failed to appeal to a majority. They were unable to encompass the diversity of views on meaningness↗︎︎ found within societies after the collapse of the systematic mode. Because the countercultures were mass movements, they could not provide community.

When these failures became obvious, the countercultures disintegrated. They were replaced by the subcultural mode↗︎︎, which abandoned universalism, and so was able to address all these problems successfully.

This page explains how the countercultures:

  • failed to find new foundations for their universalist systems
  • … and so were revealed as idealistically impractical
  • failed to address the differences in people’s interests, values, purposes, and needs
  • failed to hold together their coalitions, and so broke up into subcultures
  • failed to provide strong social bonds—only membership in a nation-sized counterculture
  • failed to cope with their partial success
  • failed to transcend their oppositional (counter-cultural) attitude

The subcultural mode developed reasonably effective solutions for each of these problems. I foreshadow each solution briefly here, and describe them in detail in the subcultures section.

Failure to find new foundations

Systematic eternalism↗︎︎ depends on a foundation: some eternal ordering principle↗︎︎. On that, it builds a structure of justification, which gives everything meaning. By the mid-twentieth-century, this had clearly failed. Nihilism↗︎︎ seemed the only possible alternative.

Both countercultures recognized that the 1950s American mainstream was an empty shell, based on collective pretense, with mere materialism↗︎︎ at its core. It might as well be outright nihilism, they thought.

But… there is a more generous way of interpreting the “hypocrisy” of the 1950s. Everyone understood, at some level, that the structure of justification no longer worked. However, everyone also understood, at some level, that just pretending was enough to keep the system working. This was actually right, because there never was a genuine foundation for systematic eternalism. In reality, it had always largely run on ritual: everyone acting as if the system was justified. This is a good thing↗︎︎! The ritual “as if”↗︎︎ is the only way functional societies can work.

Unfortunately, by the 1950s, centuries of belief in the myth of ultimate grounding meant no one could admit there was no foundation, even as it became obvious. That meant extreme conformity had to be enforced, lest some child point out “the emperor has no throne” and the whole thing would come tumbling down. Which is exactly what hippie kids did; and so it did tumble down, startlingly rapidly. Belief in the system completely collapsed in the decade between the mid-60s and the mid-70s.

The kids imagined they could build a new eternalism on a new foundation, but they were wrong. They doubled down on eternalism, and lost again. “Everything is totally connected—peace, love, happiness!” didn’t work. Neither did “Jesus is my personal savior!” Both countercultures innovated, but these foundations were not new, and their inadequacy had already been understood a century earlier.

Monism and dualism provided easy-to-understand conceptual themes that temporarily unified the countercultures; but neither actually provided a convincing new system of meaning. Instead, it was this-worldly benefits that gave them mass appeal.

Mainly, the countercultures unintentionally underwrote a relieved regression of their followers into a comfortable pre-systematic mode↗︎︎, implicitly rejecting the new systems created by their leaders. On the monist side: happy greedy piglets sucking at the teats of consumer capitalism, willing to make only symbolic gestures (recycling) toward social/economic transformation. On the dualist side: happily amoral heathens committing adultery, having abortions, and taking drugs, willing to make only symbolic gestures (God talk) toward social/cultural transformation. Leaders of both movements saw these as catastrophic and incomprehensible failures of commitment and discipline.

Subcultures, having abandoned universalism, had freedom to innovate without attempting to justify meanings in terms of any foundation. Some began to abandon eternalism as well, and so to acknowledge nebulosity↗︎︎. Naturally, they ran on ritual and creative make-believe: for example, dressing in an elaborate, distinctive, set style to go to a club where a band played music from a genre specific to the subculture, and everyone danced in the ritually correct manner.

Idealistic, extreme, and impractical

The countercultures had to drop rationality to make their foundational claims seem plausible. This was massively unhelpful. Unmoored from reality, both proliferated idealistic fantasies that the 1950s mainstream would have laughed at. The true believers who tried hardest to put them into practice often ended up psychologically damaged.

Fortunately, the mythologies-you-were-supposed-to-believe weren’t believable. Counterculturalists tried, but eventually most found the contradictions with reality too obvious. By 1975, “if enough of us get high, we can end war” sounded frighteningly stupid, and so the monist counterculture was over. By 1990, “the Tribulation has begun—we must institute Biblical law to fight the Antichrist” sounded frighteningly stupid, and so the dualist counterculture was over.

The countercultures did profoundly transform American society and culture, but most people wound up adopting a pragmatic mixture of their views. On the issues they disagreed about most—for instance sex and gender—the majority compromised between their extremes. It became clear that “men and women are exactly the same by nature and should act that way” wasn’t going to work for most people; but neither would “a woman’s place is in the home.” Similarly, life-long monogamy and endless “free love” would both be nightmares for most people. The majority adopted sequential-mostly-monogamy as their sexual morality. That has no coherent ideological justification, but seems to work for most people.

Sociological surveys suggest that people’s moral judgements are much less divergent than ideologues want—and since discussion is dominated by ideologues, morality is also much less divergent than most people believe. The culture war is mostly for show. “Values” talk functions largely to signal tribal identity and class status.

Each of the extreme positions on sex and gender do work well for small minorities, which formed subcultures. In San Francisco, you should not be surprised to hear “we’re so excited—one of my wife’s female lovers is having a baby!” In New York, you should not be surprised to hear about marriages between teenagers who have had only one chaperoned meeting, arranged by families who have been in America for generations.

Broadly, subcultures abandoned the grand attempt to reform the entire nation to fit an ideological vision. They found solutions that were good enough for a subsociety.

Failure to address diversity

Universalism is necessarily illiberal: it forces a one-size-fits-all system on everyone. People have diverse desires and capabilities, and inevitably the system is wrong for some. Both countercultures aimed for inclusivity, to sweep as many people as possible into their coalition, and attempted to sweep under the rug those who didn’t fit. Both failed: their overarching themes of monism and dualism were not strong enough to hold together disparate populations.

Social inclusivity was a central theme of the monist counterculture. It championed the extension of legal and social equality to broad demographic groups, such as races and sexes. It united a coalition of identity movements (blacks, Chicanos↗︎︎, women, gays) with the claim that The Establishment was the single source of all oppression. Theory promised that all minorities would be liberated simultaneously when the system was overthrown. But, in fact, the interests of these groups often diverged, and leaders of the overall movement (mostly straight middle-class white men) were unable to keep them in line with the broad program.

Monist inclusivity also did not address differences within demographic groups. For example, some women wanted careers, and others wanted to stay home and care for their husband and children. “Equality” was not what homemakers wanted. Within the feminist left, some saw lesbians as the vanguard of liberation; others considered them predatory male-identified threats to women’s solidarity and safety from sexual harassment. This produced the first of many feminist fissions—one of the earliest manifestations of subculturalism. In the subcultural era, the left recognized the inclusive counterculture’s failure to address diversity. It advocated multiculturalism (in effect, separatism) instead.

The monist counterculture advocated “everyone doing their own thing”—a plea to allow diversity after the forced conformity of the 1950s monoculture. That did produce an explosion of cultural creativity; but cynics pointed out that everyone was “doing their own thing” in exactly the same way. The counterculture’s universalism meant you had to wear your hair long and smoke dope and worship Che Guevara to fit in. Punk—the first subculture—sneered at countercultural conformism.

Insofar as the monist counterculture did allow individualism, it sowed the seeds of its own destruction. In the mid-1970s, it fragmented into diverse subcultures, which went their own ways. Some people cared more about politics, and continued that struggle—but often found themselves divided over the meaning of “equality” or how best to achieve it. Others cared more about inner transformation, and pursued their various new religious movements. Many felt burned out and disillusioned, and abandoned monist ideology for getting on with a normal life.

Meanwhile, dualist counterculture leaders also emphasized inclusivity as a consequence of universalism. All women should obey their husbands, regardless of their particular faith. That’s something dualists could all agree on, because men and women are unambiguously different, and so must have dual roles. (Denying the nebulosity↗︎︎ of distinctions is the definition of dualism.)

Inclusivity was also dualists’ route to building a powerful political coalition. The main Religious Right organizations, such as the Moral Majority, promoted common cause among Fundamentalists, Charismatics, conservative Catholics, and Orthodox Jews. They also promoted a united front across a wide range of political issues, such as the rights of the unborn, school prayer, gaining military supremacy to defeat global communism, and opposition to pornography, homosexuality, and miscellaneous other sinful sexual deviance.

The dualist counterculture’s ecumenism was a lasting legacy, but the broad agenda was not. General-purpose conservative political action groups found themselves spread too thin to effect change. Different conservatives cared about different issues. They formed single-purpose organizations that proved more effective.

The founders of the Moral Majority genuinely believed they represented that—but in time discovered that they didn’t. Whether or not it was moral, the Moral Majority definitely did not command the allegiance of a majority. At most, about 40% of Americans aligned with their agenda. Likewise, at most about 40% of Americans aligned with the values of the monist counterculture. Of the rest, some were centrists who found some value and some fault in both. But many wished to be left alone, to pursue their own distinctive purposes, as individuals or as subcultures. They were unwilling to be dictated to by moralizing priests and political activists of either persuasion.

Recognizing diversity, and organizing around it, was the essence of subculturalism.

Failure to provide community

Both countercultures promised a brotherhood of all counterculture participants. That was not a workable basis for community, because there were too many participants, and they were too diverse.

Instead, the countercultures provided membership-based tribal identities. Unfortunately, identity is not community, although the countercultures often confused the two. These identities were mainly harmful, I think; they did not provide much commonality or social support within a counterculture, and they accentuated the differences between them. Still, for many participants, they persist to the present day. That energizes the culture war.

In “The personal is political” I explained how each counterculture also attempted to create a level of social organization larger than a family and smaller than a nation-state, to provide the intermediate-scale groups that humans naturally crave. So I won’t go into detail here, but briefly:

  • Monists flocked to rural communes, which mostly failed, for predictable reasons. Those that succeeded became subcultures.

  • Renewed practical support from churches as community-builders was an enduring contribution of the dualist counterculture. Churches are places of ritual, and it is ritual that holds communities together. On the whole, the rump of the dualist counterculture is in better shape now than the monist rump, and church community may be the reason. Megachurches are a particularly successful version. Those function as subsocieties↗︎︎—a distinctive feature of the subcultural mode.

Failure to transcend the oppositional attitude and cope with success

You can’t be a counter-culture if you take over the mainstream. You can’t be romantic rebels↗︎︎ if you control the most powerful government in the world. You can’t rail against the culture industry when you run it.

Because the ’50s systematic mainstream was a hollow shell, both countercultures rapidly gained unexpected, albeit partial, success. Unfortunately, they had no realistic plans for what to do when they won (as I explained in “Idealistic, extreme, and impractical” above). What does the dog do when it catches the car? Rebellion becomes ridiculous and dysfunctional.

The monist counterculture railed against capitalism, but its brilliant cultural creations—its music, its graphic design styles, its clothes, its films—were perfect consumer products. Hippies and the culture industry quickly coopted each other, fusing monist values with capitalist commodity fetishism. That diffused holistic peace-love-freedom-wow-man themes throughout American culture, but also distorted and trivialized the most serious achievements. The punk subculture was a reaction to mid-70s corporate rock↗︎︎: the hippies, punks said, had “sold out” to the music business.

Success was a mixed blessing for politics, too. As either movement achieved one of its aims, supporters for whom it was the critical issue—whether ending the draft, or defeating the Equal Rights Amendment—lost interest.

In 1989, Jerry Falwell, the co-founder and public face of the Moral Majority, disbanded the organization, declaring “Our goal has been achieved… The religious right is solidly in place and religious conservatives in America are now in for the duration.” That seemed true. But it was also true that donations had decreased dramatically, as the golden Reagan years dissipated moral panic; and so the Moral Majority was no longer financially viable.

Paul Weyrich had co-founded and named the Moral Majority, and acted as its behind-the-scenes organizational strategist. In 1999, three years into Bill Clinton’s presidency, and ten years after Falwell’s declaration of success, he wrote a brilliant “Letter to Conservatives↗︎︎,” proposing conservative subculturalism:

We probably have lost the culture war. I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values. If there really were a moral majority out there, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago.

[We must] look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word “holy” means “set apart,” and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, “set apart.” We have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy.

The promising thing about a strategy of separation is that it has more to do with who we are, and what we become, than it does with what the other side is doing and what we are going to do about it.

This is a perfect articulation of the subcultural mode, and of its political model: Archipelago. Subcultures are not opposed to each other. They separate from each other in order to pursue their own purposes, without attempting to impose them on anyone else.

Wreckage: the culture war

Wreckage in a sea battle

Both sides of the culture war now believe they are losing.

Both sides are wrong: they lost decades ago.

We all lost.

You don’t need me to tell you that politics has become dysfunctional. That it is polarized by a culture war. That too many people are turning to extremism because their governments can’t get anything done.

Both American countercultures have been dead for more than a quarter century. However, they are still locked in combat as decaying kaiju↗︎︎ zombies: the culture war. Their trail of collateral damage scars our social landscape.

Or, as I put it in the introduction to this chapter, the countercultures were galleons built to escape the conflagration of systematic civilization. But galleons are archaic, clumsy, ornately ridiculous vessels, ill-suited to contemporary conditions. With the rejection of rationality, they came unmoored from their foundations↗︎︎. They drifted, collided, and battled, until finally breaking up. Now the wreckage is sinking.

The left and right of current American electoral politics are direct descendants of the 1960s-80s monist and dualist countercultures. In the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump’s signature issue is “build a wall”—a concrete manifestation of dualism, whose concern is to harden boundaries and sever connections. Clinton responds by advocating “building bridges” instead. She means that metaphorically,1 as a statement of monism, the impulse to eliminate boundaries and connect everything. I think, though, that this may be the last American national election to be fought along the monist-dualist axis.

Overview of this page

The sections of this page are:

We are doing politics wrong
The culture war blocks sensible solutions to urgent and important social, cultural, psychological, and practical problems.
Baby Boomer bafflement
Many people get stuck in the “native mode↗︎︎” of their twenties. The culture war is mainly fought by those who participated in one of the countercultures back in the day, can’t understand why it failed, and are still trying to make it work. This section also summarizes the rest of the page as a series of bullet points.
Let go of the sacred myths of your tribe
The culture war chooses symbols and myths, rather than pragmatic issues, as the battlefield. Sacred abstractions make compromise difficult—but, fortunately, they are not what anyone really cares about.
Why are THOSE PEOPLE so awful?
Because they, like you, are fighting about identity, status, dominance, and tribal survival—not, as both sides claim, “values.”
Disentangling the culture war
If both sides understood what they actually want and care about most, it would help resolve the conflict.

We are doing politics wrong

The social world is going to hell. I don’t need to list the disasters happening just today; check your social media feed for full details.

Politics is supposed to be the way to deal with vast problems and impending catastrophes. It is totally not working. It’s the problem, not the solution.

This is obvious and uncontroversial↗︎︎. For instance, throughout the past five years, polls have found that less than 20%↗︎︎ of Americans have approved of the job Congress is doing. Less than 10%, sometimes! Democracy is, by definition, not functioning when most people disapprove of the government. The two Presidential candidates are both loathed↗︎︎, to an unprecedented extent↗︎︎. The major parties, though supposedly representing the monist and dualist value systems, are both widely considered to promote little more than the interests of their corporate donors. Media coverage of politics is awful; deliberately making everything worse↗︎︎ in pursuit of advertising dollars. The electorate is hyperpolarized↗︎︎, and Democrats and Republicans hate and distrust each other more than in decades↗︎︎.

This seems to be approaching a breaking point: in many parts of the world, extremist parties, bizarre policies, and absurd candidates are gaining momentum. This reflects not a public desire for extremism, but a revulsion with dysfunctional politics-as-usual, and recognition that fundamental change of some sort is urgent.

Campaign poster: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords

Tragically, the oppositional attitude of the counter-cultures, and their mirror-image structural duality, was a perfect fit for the American two-party system. In the “Great Rotation” of the meanings of left and right, “values” captured the political process. That removed many important issues from democratic consideration—because they aren’t about “values.” This is, I think, the root cause of current political dysfunction.

It has also been terrific for the ruling class—both politicians and plutocrats. When politics is mostly about sex, drugs↗︎︎, religion, and cartoon frogs↗︎︎, it is much easier to cut backroom deals that capture regulatory agencies↗︎︎ and redirect↗︎︎ trillions of tax dollars to business interests. So long as a policy question does not line up with the monist-vs.-dualist axis, it is not “political” and therefore can be sold to the highest-bidding lobbyists.

For the past decade, globally, macroeconomic policy has been run largely for the benefit of the financial industry, at an enormous cost to everyone else. This is not a right-vs.-left issue. It is not even a rich-vs.-poor issue. It’s an everybody-else-vs.-the-financial-industry issue. How can subsidies in excess of a trillion dollars a year persist, with no popular support from either the right or the left? Because it’s not about “values,” it is “not political” under the current definition of politics. The Great Rotation removed the single most important policy issue from the democratic process.

Baby Boomer bafflement

The culture war persists largely because most Baby Boomers2 do not understand why their countercultures failed. Although the countercultures have been over for a quarter century, participants on both sides do not accept this obvious fact, and are unwilling to draw any conclusions from it. This refusal is what animates the undead Japanese movie monsters—or, to switch metaphors in mid-ocean, it is the reason doomed navies are still fighting from sinking wrecks.3

Many participants still have a wistful certainty that someday, somehow, the glorious counterculture of their youth will rise again, and its eternal truth↗︎︎ and justice will triumphantly replace the corrupt mainstream. (This requires deliberately not-noticing that there hasn’t been a mainstream for decades.) They maintain a rosy nostalgia for the hippie or Reagan eras. They cherish salvation fantasies for the future “after the Revolution,” or “when we take back America.” This is entirely unrealistic, on both sides.

Both sides resent the other as the apparent explanation for their own counterculture’s failure. I suspect one reason the culture war has heated up dramatically in the past few years is that Baby Boomers realize they will pass out of public life over the next decade, and now is their last chance to impose their values on everyone else. It’s the final, desperate push before their time runs out. Realizing that victory is unlikely within their lifetime accounts for some of bitterness of the war.

Maybe understanding that opposition from the other tribe was not the reason for failure can help overcome polarization?

  • Your counterculture did not fail because the other counterculture opposed it. (They did, but that’s not why.)
  • Your counterculture failed because the majority did not agree with it.
  • The majority rejected your counterculture because it was plainly wrong about many things.
  • It would help if you understood how younger generations relate to meaningness; they are right that some of your main issues are illusory.
  • You need to let go of the sacred myths of your tribe. Decades ago they inspired genuinely positive social change, but now they produce only frustration and hatred and stalemate. Everyone born after 1970 thinks they are idiotic. You are stuck pretending to believe, but even you secretly know they aren’t true.
  • Your counterculture and the other one also agree about many things!
  • Some of what you agree about is wrong; you should admit that and drop it.
  • Some of what you agree about is right↗︎︎; you should work together to support it.
  • Much of what you imagine you fight about is symbolic, not substantive. Your advocacy of these issues is mostly a statement of tribal identity, and claims for high status within your tribe.
  • When your symbolic issues blow up into actual political conflicts, often you are fighting to establish tribal dominance, not to accomplish pragmatic improvements in society.
  • If you understand what you really disagree about, and why, you may be able to find pragmatic compromises, instead of both sides demanding total victory.

Let go of the sacred myths of your tribe

Both countercultures were eternalisms↗︎︎: claims about the Ultimate↗︎︎ Truth Of Everything↗︎︎ that explains all meanings. Eternalism is always harmful: it makes you stupid (because the Eternal Truth is not always so); emotionally, morally, and socially immature↗︎︎; and vicious when you feel you have to defend it even in cases where it’s obviously wrong.

Both countercultures were attempts to rescue eternalism from the threat of nihilism. Both failed, because eternalism can’t work. But when the only alternative seems to be nihilism, any amount of pretense, deceit, and distortion seems justified in defending even a failed eternalism.

The countercultural eternalisms function much like religions, even when, on both sides, they are largely non-theistic (“political correctness,” patriotic nationalism). They are grand narratives↗︎︎ that start from the sacred principles of monism and dualism, and elaborate into vast mythologies that are supposed to make the central Truth believable. But the mythologies themselves are not believable,4 and both Truths are false. Continuing to pretend you believe them is morally wrong, not only—but not least—because that pretense has ruined politics.

Some of the hardest-fought culture war battlegrounds are not about “values” as such, much less policy proposals; they are over symbols. That’s what makes it a culture war. Here’s Scott Alexander, in “Five Case Studies On Politicization↗︎︎”:

The Red Tribe and Blue Tribe have different narratives, which they use to tie together everything that happens into reasons why their tribe is good and the other tribe is bad.

Sometimes this results in them seizing upon different sides of an apparently nonpolitical issue when these support their narrative; for example, Republicans generally supporting a quarantine against Ebola, Democrats generally opposing it. [A quarantine is a boundary—the essence of monism vs. dualism.] Other times it results in a side trying to gain publicity for stories that support their narrative while sinking their opponents’ preferred stories – Rotherham for some Reds; Ferguson for some Blues.

When an issue gets tied into a political narrative, it stops being about itself and starts being about the wider conflict between tribes until eventually it becomes viewed as a Referendum On Everything: “do you think the Blue Tribe is right on every issue and the Red Tribe is terrible and stupid, or vice versa?”

Some examples are entirely symbolic.5 A Boomer/countercultural example was flag burning↗︎︎; everyone seems to have lost interest, but that was huge on several occasions over several decades. Current Millennial/atomized examples are the fights over pronouns and dead gorillas↗︎︎.

More typically↗︎︎, symbolic politics contest issues that have some practical importance, but not nearly enough to justify the effort that goes into them; or in which symbolic meanings overlay and distort an underlying practical matter. Abortion—“a condensation symbol for changes in women’s roles, the family, and acceptable sexual behavior”6—is an example I have used repeatedly. I’ve done that because it’s perhaps uniquely central to the culture war.

To be fair to the right, I would like to give an example from the left that is equally important and equally distorted, but I can’t think of one. Gun control is similar in being mainly symbolic: primarily of the culture war itself, but also race, gender, community, and the proper relationship between individuals and the state. However, both left and right are at fault for distorting guns’ meanings and magnifying them far beyond practical import.7 Recycling is a left-only structural parallel to abortion—a moralizing “condensation symbol” for monist conscientiousness—but no one actually cares about it.

Keystone XL↗︎︎ was less central than abortion, but still “a top-tier election issue for the 2014 elections for the United States Senate, House of Representatives, governors in states and territories, and many state and local positions as well.”8 In case you missed the fuss, Keystone XL was a proposed oil pipeline. The environmental lobby, and the American left in general, devoted extraordinary efforts↗︎︎ to preventing its construction. As far as I can tell, the possible environmental consequences were minor; there are many more important environmental policy questions which the movement has fought much less hard. Although notionally environmentalists’ concern was possible spills, everyone understood that Keystone was symbolically about global warming, and therefore really about global warming—even though everyone also understands that in practice it would have had almost no effect. Other policies affect carbon emissions far more, and might have been altered with far less effort. So why did the left choose to draw a line in the sand at Keystone XL?

In “The toxoplasma of rage↗︎︎,” Alexander suggests an explanation.9 Advocacy groups deliberately choose bad examples because those generate the most controversy. The one they promote is obviously wrong, so the Tweedledum side objects loudly. However, the general principle is considered correct by everyone on the Tweedledee side, so they feel they have to defend it. Their specific arguments are perforce lousy—even if the principle is right—so Tweedledum senses blood in the water and closes in for the kill. But the underlying, broader issue seems critical, so Tweedledee will defend the unconvincing symbolic example to the death. The brutality of the ensuing battle generates huge publicity for the cause. (And also, to be cynical, donations to the advocacy organization, and advertising revenue for the media that cover it and fan the flames.)

If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk up the least credible case you can find. A rape that obviously happened? Shove it in people’s face and they’ll admit it’s an outrage, but they’re not going to talk about it much. There are a zillion outrages every day. A rape allegation will only spread if it’s dubious enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics. People start screaming at each other about how they’re misogynist or misandrist or whatever, and your Facebook feed gets hundreds of comments in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS about how my ingroup is being persecuted by your ingroup.10

Wreck of the Birkenhead: rescue from a sinking ship

For both sides, it is obvious that the other mythology is false. That eternalism is a sinking ship. It’s about to disappear beneath the black waves of nihilism.

Secretly, both sides also know their own mythology has been shot full of holes, too. It is taking on water at a terrifying rate—but from the splintered deck you stand on, it looks less bad than the other.

I call out to you:

It’s a pile of water-logged junk; the rest will sink soon; why don’t you come join us in our fleet of nimble new watercraft?

I would like to encourage stuck-in-the-past counterculturalists to learn the later modes of meaningness↗︎︎. Then you can engage with this world, as it is, instead of trying to live in fantasies of what should have happened, decades ago; or maybe will someday happen, if only your counterculture triumphs.

The subcultural mode↗︎︎ of relating to meaningness developed effective solutions to many of problems the countercultures tried, and failed, to address. Subculturalism gave rise to other problems, some of which the atomized mode↗︎︎ addressed effectively. We now live in a world shaped by these movements.

Many counterculturalists can’t even see the central problems of meaning that younger generations face.11 Looking through a countercultural lens, the only thing that matters is whether the monist or dualist values overpower the other set. From that point of view, the social, cultural, and psychological concerns of younger generations are trivial—because younger people mostly don’t care about monism vs. dualism. But these new problems of meaning are generated by the world we all live in; and they are inescapable, except by retreating into fantasies of total countercultural victory.

Why are THOSE PEOPLE so awful?

They actually are awful. It’s not just that they are the Other Tribe.

Or, at least, they are acting awfully. They are behaving atrociously because they, like you, are fighting about identity↗︎︎, personal adequacy, dominance, and tribal survival↗︎︎. And they, like you, recognize they are losing. When you feel that you are losing a life-or-death struggle, you abandon rules of engagement; any atrocity is justified.

During the countercultural era, political conflict concerned substantive social issues, and genuine differences in values. Nowadays, the zombie culture war is mostly about identity—trumpeting loyal membership in your political tribe—and about your status within that tribe. That means participants have little motivation to engage in actual political struggles. What appears to be politics is often ritual posturing, communicating to one’s own tribe, rather than engaging with the other one. When culture warriors pretend to promote the old myths, everyone knows they are unworkable, so this is mere theatre.

Both countercultures, back then, tried to make membership in the counterculture the main source of identity and of community. This worked badly; the countercultures were too big to function well that way. However, may of the participants still do identify closely with their counterculture, and do still try to take it as their community, or extended family.

On that basis, anything that contradicts the mythology is taken as a personal attack on one’s self, and as violence against one’s clan, rather than disagreement about issues. Unfortunately, this perception is often justified. When the two sides of the culture war do engage, it is mainly just tribal conflict. It’s meta: a fight about the fight itself. The big question is who is going to win, not—as in the ’60s-80s countercultural era—“how can we change society for the better?”

James Davison Hunter coined the term “culture war” in a classic 1991 book↗︎︎. He wrote:

Each side ardently believes that the other embodies and expresses an aggressive program of social, political, and religious intolerance. According to their respective literature, each side has wittingly or unwittingly spawned a political agenda that is antidemocratic and even totalitarian in its thrust.

Both claim to speak for the majority, both attempt to monopolize the symbols of legitimacy, both identify their opponents with a program of intolerance and totalitarian suppression. Both sides use the language of extremism and thereby sensationalize the threat represented by their adversaries.

Perceived threats typically engender a sense of cohesiveness among the threatened members. In the act of opposing an adversary, the community expresses a common moral indignation, and asserts its moral authority anew. Thus, not only is the community drawn together, united as a collectivity, but it is reminded of its heritage, its duty, and its mission to the larger world. Standing against an adversary is the ritual reaffirmation of the community’s identity in the face of what may be a far greater adversary, its own internal moral disintegration. It is part of a natural collective response to the threat of the community’s own structural insecurity and moral instability.12

As I wrote earlier, the moralization of politics has been a disaster. It is reinforced by the two-track class system, which relies on the illusion that you are morally superior to everyone in the other tribe.

When everyone in the other tribe is eeeeevil, they cannot be trusted to honor a compromise. The war can only be a bare power struggle for domination; for total victory; for the outright elimination of the other tribe. Not, in America at least, a literal genocide: but many on both sides of the culture war believe that the country can only be saved when everyone who holds the wrong ideology has been bullied into holding the correct one.

In America, surveys show↗︎︎ that both sides are increasingly fearful of the other, and increasingly angry at them. Each side’s perception that their tribe is besieged, threatened, and may not survive, is entirely realistic. Both are probably doomed. Frantic bailing keeps the wrecks above water—but Generation X mostly doesn’t care, and the Millennials are not organized enough to keep ships afloat after the Boomers are gone.

At risk of sounding preachy: all this is Buddhism 101. Confusion leads to fear; fear leads to anger; anger leads to aggression; aggression leads to more confusion, fear, and anger; those lead to death and damnation.

Standing down requires breaking the confusion/fear/anger/aggression cycle. This page and the next try to address the confusion part—which, according to Buddhism 101, is where it always starts, and has to end.

Disentangling the culture war

The culture war can be fun—when you feel like you are winning. Then, there is no motivation to negotiate, compromise, or look for mutually acceptable solutions. However, both sides feel like they are losing much of the time, and most people probably recognize that the culture war is harmful, and should, ideally, somehow, stop. On the other hand, the other side is obviously hateful and wrong, so that doesn’t seem realistic.

Anyway, straight-up compromise is mostly impossible, because there are sacred values involved, and you can’t compromise about sacredness↗︎︎.

Progress has to come from better understanding of what both sides actually care about. That must be disentangled from claims they feel they must defend because it’s part of their contrived mythology. I believe that each tribe’s account of its own values and interests is wrong, so both tribes misunderstand not only what the other side wants, but what they want themselves. When that is clarified, both sides may find that many concrete issues, which they had infused with abstract sacredness, are not critical after all. Having discovered their actual interests, they can negotiate pragmatic solutions.

I don’t have a full understanding of either tribe’s values and interests, but I hope to contribute some insights. I also suggest that recent empirical studies of how people hold sacred moral, political, and religious values have much to offer. I would point to work by, for example, Scott Atran↗︎︎ on negotiating with fundamentalists, Jonathan Haidt↗︎︎ on the moral psychology of liberals vs. conservatives, and Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban↗︎︎ on political motivations.

It might seem idealistic that either side would be willing to make a serious effort to resolve the culture war. Perhaps so; but it’s important enough that we ought not to rule it out. However… time may have run out. The current culture war is led by Baby Boomers, whose age may make them resistant to new ideas; and anyway they will be aging out of power soon. So maybe it doesn’t matter! On the other hand, a new “echo” culture war has emerged recently, conducted largely by Millennials over social media. The atomized, echo war↗︎︎ has some—not all—of the same dynamics as the countercultural one, so some of the same resolution methods may apply.

Much of my analysis is on the next page, “Completing the countercultures.” I apply the fundamental method of the Meaningness book: understanding a conflict in terms of confused stances↗︎︎, disentangling their fixations↗︎︎ and denials↗︎︎ of meaning, and thereby shifting to a complete stance↗︎︎. That is a bit abstract. The remainder of this section makes some other, tentative, basic suggestions that are not particularly connected with the Meaningness framework.

Disentangling morality from politics would be enormously helpful. This might require a better popular understanding of the functions of morality—both its legitimate and its illegitimate ones. In the culture war, moral judgement functions mainly to maintain self-esteem through self-justification and tribal identification, including demonizing the other tribe.13 That is, you try to convince yourself, and your community, that you are a good person because you are On The Right Side, and you loathe the other tribe more than anyone. Besides the harm done, this actually doesn’t work very well. Self-righteous contempt delivers a momentary confidence boost, but in the long run hatred doesn’t feel all that great. Also, it forces you into constant anxious competition to see who is best at proclaiming tribal dogmas. There are other, better bases for self-esteem. Could we make this common knowledge?

Research14 suggests that the differences in values between the tribes are much smaller than both think. Most supposed conflicts in fundamental values are actually disagreements about concrete issues (is euthanasia OK? is cultural appropriation OK?) that were given symbolic significance through mythological reasoning. Research finds that there are differences in fundamental values, but they are only matters of degree: differing emphasis when evaluating competing moral considerations. For example, Haidt and his collaborators found that conservatives give greater weight to purity, as a fundamental principle, and progressives give greater weight to care for others. (The division between pure and impure is a dualist concern, and connection with others is a monist one.) But everyone recognizes the significance of both.

Arnold Kling, in The Three Languages of Politics↗︎︎, similarly suggests that progressives are primarily concerned with oppression, conservatives with civilization vs. barbarism, and libertarians with freedom vs. coercion. When each group talks politics, they make claims exclusively in terms of one of these moral axes, ignoring the other two. Consequently, they talk past each other; no one hears arguments from the other groups.

On this account, progressivism, conservatism, and libertarianism are all simplistic: they sacrifice moral accuracy for ideological consistency. It is much easier to make moral judgements by taking only one of three factors into account—but you will often get the wrong answer.

Kling’s framework gives me hope: everyone can agree that oppression is bad, civilization is good, and freedom is good. There is no fundamental values conflict: conservatives do not favor oppression, and progressives do not favor barbarism—despite accusations from the other side in both cases. And no one favors coercion for its own sake. In some concrete cases, there are tradeoffs between the considerations; these can be negotiated only when all are recognized and understood.

Several empirical studies suggest that opposing political groups can come to understand each other if they learn to talk in terms of the other side’s preferred fundamental values. Not only that; they can often even change the other side’s mind that way:

We presented two messages in support of same-sex marriage. One message emphasized the need for equal rights for same-sex couples. It is framed in terms of a value—equality—that research has shown resonates more strongly among liberals than conservatives. The other message was designed to appeal to values of patriotism and group loyalty, which have been shown to resonate more with conservatives. (It argued that “same-sex couples are proud and patriotic Americans” who “contribute to the American economy and society.”) Conservatives supported same-sex marriage significantly more if they read the patriotism message rather than the fairness one.

In a parallel experiment, we presented two messages in support of increased military spending. One argued that we should “take pride in our military,” which “unifies us both at home and abroad.” The other argued that, through the military, the poor and disadvantaged “can achieve equal standing,” by ensuring they have “a reliable salary and a future apart from the challenges of poverty and inequality.” Liberals expressed significantly greater support for increasing military spending if they read the fairness message rather than the patriotism one.15

That’s Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg, in “The Key to Political Persuasion↗︎︎,” summarizing their “From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?↗︎︎.” Scott Alexander riffs on↗︎︎ another of their papers↗︎︎, on persuading conservatives to care about global warming by using the language of moral purity.

As Willer, Feinberg, and Alexander all note, few people are currently either willing or able to switch moral languages.16 (Partly because political arguments are not meant to persuade the other side: they are meant to demonstrate conformity—or, even better, virtuosity—to your own.) What would motivate more people to learn? Can we agree to reward members of our own tribe for calming down the other?

The ability to coordinate three incommensurable moral systems, or to explain a topic in terms of a system other than your own, may require ethical meta-systematicity↗︎︎. That ability is, unfortunately, uncommon. I’ve also called it “ethical fluidity,” and it’s closely related to the complete stance↗︎︎ and the fluid mode↗︎︎. Elsewhere, I’ve suggested the possibility of developing a curriculum that helps people develop meta-systematic cognitive ability, and to transition into fluidity.

Perhaps you’d like to try an exercise? One that might help develop meta-systematic skills, and perhaps propel you toward fluidity↗︎︎?

  1. Write another brief argument—a few sentences—explaining why legal same-sex marriage is a good thing, in terms of the values language preferred by social conservatives: decency, loyalty, sanctity, purity, respect. Make it significantly different from Willer and Feinberg’s “proud and patriotic, contributing to America.” (This is easier than parts 2 and 3: some social conservatives do support same-sex marriage based on fundamental conservative values.)

  2. Write an argument explaining why same-sex marriage should be prohibited, in terms of the values language progressives prefer: oppression, care, fairness, equality. (This is more difficult, but it’s entirely possible—although I doubt you could convince many progressives.)

  3. Explain why same-sex marriage should be prohibited, in the values language libertarians prefer: freedom, procedural justice, rationality. (This question is extra credit for advanced students!)

(This is an “ideological Turing Test↗︎︎.”)

In “The illusion of understanding,” I reviewed research that showed that people think they understand politics much better than they actually do. Experimenters asked people to explain how a proposed policy, which they favored, would work. (Rather than to explain why it is Right!) Mostly, they couldn’t, which led them to realize they didn’t know.

The result was that they expressed more moderate opinions, and became less willing to make political donations in support of the programs, after discovering that they didn’t understand them as well as they had thought. I find this cheering.

Weeden and Kurzban, in research summarized in The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It↗︎︎, find that differing pragmatic interests explain Americans’ political opinions better than differing ideological “values.” Supposed moral considerations are often just rationalizations for advocating government policies that will benefit you and your community (often at the expense of many or most other people).

Their discussion of sexual politics inspired mine in “The personal is political.” Analyzing politics, as I did there, in terms of three competing reproductive strategies may help both sides of the culture war understand each other’s interests, find unexpected areas of agreement, and negotiate pragmatic truces where there are genuine conflicts.17

To recap, the three strategies are:

  1. Opportunistic mating without marriage, and with minimal parental investment—especially, minimal support by fathers. This is most common among the underclass and lower working class.

  2. Early marriage (teens or early twenties); many children, starting shortly after marriage; emphasis on life-long monogamy; and high total parental investment, spread over many children. This large-family strategy became typical in the upper working class and lower middle class.

  3. Marriage and children delayed to late twenties or into the thirties in order to accumulate resources (university education and establishing a career); multiple sexual relationships before marriage; fewer children; highest per-child parental investment. This is typical of the upper middle class.

I found that setting aside “Biblical values” rhetoric, and understanding social conservatism as self-interested advocacy for government support for the large-family strategy, makes me more—not less—sympathetic. I don’t want a large family, but I can now see why people who do would adopt “moral” views that had previously made no sense to me. I don’t have a problem with their pursuing that strategy, so long as they leave others alone to pursue different ones.

Relatedly, Charles Murray points out↗︎︎ that upper-middle-class liberals conform to key conservative values better than conservatives do: honest hard work, stable marriages, responsible parenting, and functional community. He advocates that they “preach what they practice,” rather than promoting an ideology that excuses and promotes dysfunctional behavior in the lower classes. This also makes sense to me.18 It could be helpful for both conservatives and liberals to admit that strategies 2 and 3 have much in common, and have things to learn from each other.

On this analysis, both conservatives and middle-class liberals deliberately conflate strategies 1 and 3. It’s rhetorically convenient for social conservatives to lump together everyone else, indistinguishably, as sexual deviants. However, the typical sexual behavior of people pursuing strategies 1 and 3 is entirely different. Middle class liberals, when having casual sex before marriage, are usually careful not to get pregnant; the same cannot be said for the underclass. Conservatives choose, unhelpfully, not to recognize that sexual permissiveness has different consequences for different groups.

At the same time, liberals’ admirable concern for the oppressed leads them to express solidarity with members of the underclass pursuing strategy 1. This may blind them to the realities of underclass dysfunction—notably including the bad consequences of teenage pregnancy and single-parent families. The incentives faced by people pursuing strategy 1 are radically different from those in strategy 3—more different than either is from strategy 2. Pretending otherwise, however well intentioned, does no one any good—including not the underclass themselves.

If it is true that the fundamental issue dividing social conservatives and liberals is early marriage and large families vs. late and small, there are genuine differences of pragmatic interest. Both will naturally want the government and other institutions to support their own strategy. However, if both sides recognize that this is what they really disagree about, perhaps they can agree to let each other get on with their own strategy, and to allow an even playing field rather than demanding policy preferences for their tribe.

  • 1. Which is unfortunate, considering that America needs concrete bridges quite badly. A 2013 study by the American Society of Civil Engineers found that more than one in ten of the country’s existing bridges were not structurally sound.
  • 2. Identifying the Baby Boom generation with counterculturalists is a convenient oversimplification. The monist (hippie) counterculture was almost entirely a Baby Boomer phenomenon. However, the youngest members of the demographic baby boom, born in the late ’50s and early ’60s, were too young to participate, and are not culturally Boomers. The dualist (Evangelical) counterculture was led by the generation before the Boomers. It attracted many Boomers, but also many from the first few years of Generation X, who were born in the second half of the 1960s and came of age in the early 1980s, when the Reagan Revolution was at its peak. Polls find that many of them still identify strongly with the dualist counterculture. However, most people in Generation X overall were, and remain, subculturalists.
  • 3. Jonathan Haidt and Sam Abrams write, in a recent article on political dysfunction↗︎︎: “The end of the Cold War coincided with the baton pass from the Greatest Generation to the baby boomers, who may be more prone to hyper-partisanship. Political views of people in their 50s and 60s are strongly affected by the events they experienced in their teens and twenties. The Greatest Generation – shaped profoundly by the two world wars – entered public life psychologically prepared to put national interests above partisanship, particularly when faced with external threats such as the Soviet Union. But as the last members of that generation retired from public life in the 1990s, they passed the baton to a generation whose political instincts were shaped by the internal American culture war that began in the 1960s. The baby boomers developed their political identities by fighting one another.”
  • 4. The collapse of belief in all grand narratives is the defining feature of postmodernity. The countercultural mode was the last gasp of modernity, and the subcultural mode↗︎︎ was the first phase of postmodernity.
  • 5. This does not mean that the underlying issues are unimportant, or that they are not worth fighting over. However, I would suggest that it is more productive to contest a relevant policy proposal, rather than a symbol.
  • 6.Abortion Politics as Symbolic Politics: An Investigation into Belief Systems↗︎︎.”
  • 7. For an unusually sophisticated discussion of the ethics and politics of gun control, see the “No Silver Bullet↗︎︎” special issue of The Critique, with fine contributions from both sides.
  • 8. According to Wikipedia↗︎︎.
  • 9. Alexander doesn’t discuss Keystone XL, but other controversies in which advocates chose peculiarly unconvincing examples to fight over.
  • 10. From “Toxoplasma”; lightly edited for concision.
  • 11. This whole discussion comes out of my experience of trying to explain to American Baby Boomer Buddhists why their invented religion↗︎︎ seems irrelevant and silly to Generations X and Y. I’ve found that most younger Buddhists immediately understand and agree with my critique. Most in the Boomer generation can’t hear it. There are exceptions, though! I don’t mean to condemn the whole generation.
  • 12. Quotes from Hunter lightly edited for concision.
  • 13. In The Moral Fool↗︎︎, Hans-Georg Moeller writes: “Morality is the condition of the market of social esteem. Morality is neither customary behavior nor a set of principles, but the actual social differentiation between those who are deemed good and those who are deemed bad or evil.” And: “Morality is not so much an inner conviction that prevents people from doing bad things as a rhetorical device that helps them justify their actions before and after they act. In fact morality often leads people to commit extreme acts in the name of good—that others will view as bad or even evil. The Zhuangzi observes that this is the primary effect of morality. A society in which there is a lot of moral talk will not have fewer crimes. All the moralists in the world have not, so far, prevented war and murder. There is no correlation between more moral talk and a better world. Moral language, in fact, seems to be part of the problem, not the solution.”
  • 14. This discussion is subject to the caveat that social psychology is currently (2016) experiencing a crisis of replicability. Common research methods have been found to be unreliable, and it appears that much of what was thought to be known in the field is not true. I’m not close enough to the field to have an opinion about which of the studies I cite are likely to hold up.
  • 15. Quotes from “The Key to Political Persuasion↗︎︎,” lightly edited for concision.
  • 16. Relatedly, research by Haidt, and by Willer and Feinberg, shows that liberals and conservatives believe they understand each other’s values much better than they actually do.
  • 17. This analysis is highly tentative and may be entirely wrong; but perhaps even then it can show the form of a resolution of cultural conflict through understanding.
  • 18. This does not imply that I agree with most of what he says, there or elsewhere.

Completing the countercultures

Galleon Goteborg reconstruction sailing by London Bridge
Galleon courtesy↗︎︎ George Owens

The countercultures of the 1960s-80s took attitudes to boundaries as their central themes. The monist↗︎︎ counterculture—the 1960s youth movement—wanted to eliminate all boundaries and level all distinctions; the dualist↗︎︎ counterculture, or religious right, wanted to make them absolute.

Meaningness suggests that oppositions between such mirror-image pairs of confused stances↗︎︎ can be resolved by complete stances↗︎︎ that correct their metaphysical errors. Specifically, monism and dualism share the mistaken idea that boundaries must be perfectly crisp. Participation↗︎︎, the complete stance regarding boundaries, recognizes that they are always both nebulous↗︎︎ and patterned↗︎︎. (I’ll explain all this jargon shortly.)

Below, I apply that conceptual framework to two illustrative countercultural battlegrounds: gender and national borders. These are clear, easy, and important examples because:

  • it’s obvious that they are about boundaries
  • it’s obvious that these boundaries are both nebulous and patterned, so everyone already understands and accepts the complete stance
  • except that, even still now, ideologues sway many people by claiming otherwise
  • gender was perhaps the most important cultural issue in countercultural politics1
  • war was perhaps the most important social issue.

The same style of analysis would apply to many other contentious topics. The aim here, though, is not to resolve any concrete issues, but to show how the framework applies in general.

This may seem academic, because after the countercultural era ended most people rejected its most extreme monist and dualist positions. However, it has continuing relevance to our current culture war, which is partly a legacy of the countercultures. I will also preview the ways subsequent modes of meaningness↗︎︎ have moderated and complicated the monist/dualist conflict.

Additionally, monism and dualism are confusions of meaning that everyone sometimes falls into personally. Even if this page had no relevance to contemporary politics, seeing how monism and dualism played out decades ago may help understand them psychologically.

Boundaries are nebulous yet patterned

Confused stances↗︎︎ are defensive responses to nebulosity. “Nebulosity” is the unstable, uncertain, fluid, complex, and ill-defined nature of all meanings. These properties often seem unwelcome. The lack of any solid ground makes it difficult to build a durable personal identity, social structure, or political movement.

Confused stances are attractive because they deny↗︎︎ nebulosity, and attempt to fixate↗︎︎ meanings: to nail them in place so they will behave themselves. That is impossible, so the confused stances are all factually wrong and harmful. The culture war “values” issues are exceptionally nebulous, which makes the denial especially counterproductive here.

I have suggested that monism↗︎︎ and dualism↗︎︎ are the central themes of the two countercultures. These two confused stances concern boundaries: both physical boundaries and the boundaries between categories. Monism denies boundaries and distinctions; dualism fixates them as perfectly sharp.

Boundaries are generally nebulous; they represent real patterns, but are not objectively fixed. So, monism and dualism are both wrong.

Mandelbrot fractal
The boundary of the Mandelbrot fractal is literally infinitely complicated

Boundaries are not merely existent and nebulous, they are complicated. If you imagine putting one under a metaphorical magnifying glass, broadening out and fuzzing the line, you would see the elaborate swirling patterns of sameness and difference in the vicinity: both within and without.

Close to the boundary, it becomes impossible to say which side some items are on. Some also pass through freely; whereas others are stopped. Typically boundaries are selectively permeable.

Both monism and dualism deny complexity, which is part of their appeal. They promise simplicity and clarity. But they can do that only by hiding the variability and ambiguity of reality. It is this complexity which the complete stance recovers.

However, they are both also partly right. Monism recognizes that boundaries are never absolute; dualism recognizes that they are important, and can’t (and shouldn’t) be wished away. It would help cool the culture war if each side could concede what is right in the other’s fundamental stance.

Complete stances↗︎︎ neither deny nor fixate meanings. They recognize both nebulosity and pattern: the fact that meanings are, to varying extents, also reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite.

I call the complete stance with regard to boundaries “participation↗︎︎.” It is simply the recognition that boundaries are always both nebulous and patterned. That combines the valid insights of both monism and dualism; which is what makes it “complete.” (The title of this page is a slight pun: ideally, I would like to see the complete stance finish the war between the countercultures; in theory it could do that by including what is right in both of them.)

At an individual, psychological level, the fundamental method for resolving a confusion of meaning is to look for unacknowledged nebulosity; to notice why it is unwanted; to watch how patterns of meaning are fixated and denied in order to avoid recognizing nebulosity; and to work out what it would imply if this nebulosity were acknowledged as inherent and unavoidable, but not a defect in the fundamental nature of reality. “This nebulosity is not a cosmic problem”—maybe not much of a problem at all!—is a summary of all the complete stances. The fluid mode extends this method from the individual to the social and cultural level.

Nebulosity and pattern are both obvious everywhere, so the complete stances are obviously right (and the confused ones are obviously wrong). However, the confused stances are more appealing, so we keep returning to them.

The seeming clarity of the confused stances is particularly appealing—ironically—when you feel stressed and therefore confused. The culture war is stressful; when you feel confused and threatened by challenges to your “values,” you retreat to a simple, extreme view that you know is wrong, but that seems defensible in its absolutism.

Gender

Second-wave feminism↗︎︎ emerged during the countercultural era. It focussed initially on workplace equality, and broadened into a general equality movement. The theme of equality—sameness—resonated with the monist counterculture. The two joined in an alliance which evolved into the mainstream left.

Second wave theorists mostly argued that gender was a lie: an imposed and arbitrary social and cultural fiction with no basis in reality. They denied the existence, or at least the legitimacy, of any difference between male and female—sometimes even at the crudest biological level. Even to this day, there are gender-studies professors who claim that it has no physiological or genetic basis whatsoever.

Symmetrically: dualist theorists insisted that men and women are properly, essentially, immutably, and totally different; and that society and culture must reflect and enforce the boundary between them. Even to this day, there are religious leaders who claim that on October 27th, 4004 B.C., God decreed the gender roles of 1950s Topeka Kansas as universal and eternal↗︎︎.

During the countercultural era, when we tried hard to reject rationality, these extreme claims seemed somehow plausible. Once the era ended, the spell broke. Gender can’t be wished away, nor is it ever an entirely hard and fast division.

On average, the sexes are distinct from each other in many ways, but individuals of each sex span the range of variation. Men are diverse; women are diverse. Most men are obviously men and most women are obviously women. Some people don’t fit neatly into either category, for various reasons. There is no essential characteristic that makes someone definitely male or female, masculine or feminine. Most people are reasonably comfortable with the somewhat-different expectations contemporary society and culture have for men and women. A minority find them burdensome. No one conforms to them perfectly consistently—nor can, nor should.

This common-sense understanding, that gender is a strongly patterned but nebulous distinction, is the unexciting core of a complete stance. Most people now accept it—implicitly, at least. Both countercultural approaches are obviously wrong. Despite some irritations, the mingled ambiguity and definiteness of gender isn’t a big problem for most people most of the time.2 It’s mostly only professional ideologues and committed amateur culture warriors who still promote absolutist monist or dualist views.

Since the end of the countercultural era, subculturalism↗︎︎ and atomization↗︎︎ have further complicated the meanings of gender. The lesbian sex wars↗︎︎ split countercultural second-wave feminism into numerous subcultural third-wave sects, which took diverse stances on the metaphysics of gender, with further contributions from LGBTIQA movements. In atomization, intersectional fourth-wave feminism lost coherence, and deploys whatever shards of contradictory, shattered subcultural ideologies are convenient in the moment. I will discuss these developments later in the book.

And what of the fluid mode↗︎︎, which supposedly reflects the complete stance? I’ll give a brief account here, which may seem incomprehensible at this point; the fluidity chapter should make it clear.3

Let’s go back to the metaphor of putting a boundary under a magnifying glass to see the details of its complex nebulosity. On the micro scale, gender manifests in a pattern of interaction between specific people in a specific situation at a specific time. Observed carefully, one sees that what counts as a masculine or feminine way of interacting is a continually renegotiated, ongoing accomplishment of the participants. This does not mean it is arbitrary; indeed, it is responsive to the particulars of the situation in exquisitely fine detail. It is also, usually, so routine that it goes unnoticed. It is only when it breaks down that the nebulosity of gender comes momentarily into consciousness—before participants more-or-less skillfully repair the breach and restore its ordinary smooth operation.

This micro-level continual re-accomplishment necessarily orients to macro-scale universalist ideologies. In no social situation can we be entirely unconscious of numerous, diverse theories of what all men and women always are, or always ought to be. We can never act without some awareness of how our actions will be interpreted as meaningful according to those accounts. However, our micro-scale activity—what we say, how we say it, our body language—is never governed by any of these ideologies. They are social facts we have to work with, but not systems of rules we could conform to, even if we wanted to. Besides their extensive contradictions with each other and with obvious realities, they are not specific enough to guide action in concrete situations. They require extensive interpretation in order to become relevant. Yet we cannot choose not to perform that interpretation.

Because gender is patterned, we can never be perfectly free of it—as many second-wave feminists hoped. Because it is nebulous, we can never perfectly embody it—as many religious conservatives hoped. Between these extremes, there is an open space, in which we can take a comfortably playful attitude to choice. We all continually construct gender together; we may as well enjoy making it a collaborative work of art when we can.

Although almost no one maintains a hardcore monist or dualist gender ideology consistently, there’s always a tug toward them, because they simplify thinking. When trying to win an argument, it’s always tempting to say “well, there’s no real↗︎︎ difference between men and women, so…”; or “despite shared humanity, men and women have totally distinct proper roles, so…”—and people do say both these things frequently. It would be helpful to accomplish a cultural consensus that we don’t believe these things, so we should stop saying them and acting as though we did.

That would help clarify specific conflicts, because monism and dualism obscure the practicalities. Although some gender issues are important practically, the culture war imposes imaginary additional meanings to co-opt them as ideological battlegrounds, fought from essentialist monist or dualist positions, making them into Giant Referendums On How The Other Tribe Is Wrong About Everything.4 In the 2016 trans bathroom controversy, for instance, this was clearly deliberate: an engineered conflict, designed to increase ideological hostility among voters.

Dropping monism and dualism would still leave plenty of room for disagreements; but they would have to be argued on specific, practical grounds, instead of abstract, metaphysical ones. The complete stance itself answers no practical questions. It leaves open issues such as “what constitutes workplace equality” and “who uses which bathrooms.” However, it points out that these issues don’t have to be so goddamn serious, and that the big-picture ideologies are all quite childish and silly.

Trans issues have come to new prominence in American politics in the past couple of years, with the “TERF wars” and court battles over bathroom use. Trans people are also theoretically interesting for forcing metaphysical questions about gender boundaries: what does it even mean to ask whether they are male or female?

Most people are willing to admit that trans people have some characteristics of both genders, but many also insist that the essential determinant is one particular characteristic. That’s the “real” one. What makes that one special?

Some dualists5 would like to point to some physical characteristic, like maybe the Y chromosome, as essential. But what basis is there for that? The Bible has nothing to say about chromosomes; this can’t be a religious claim. Y chromosomes correlate statistically with penises, social dominance, and various other typically-masculine characteristics. However, there are some people↗︎︎ with Y chromosomes whom everyone believes from birth to be female, because there’s no indication—physical or mental—of masculinity, apart from the chromosome itself. And vice versa↗︎︎.6

Some monists would like to say that, since there no differences between men and women other than what is oppressively imposed by culture and society, you are whatever gender you say you are, and everyone must agree and treat you that way. Just as progressives were coming to a consensus on this point, it got complicated by an apparent analogy with Rachel Dolezal↗︎︎, who is trans black. Her career as an NAACP chapter president and university Africana Studies teacher was disrupted when her white parents pointed out that she was born white, with blue eyes and blond hair, and has no black ancestors. She continues to insist that she is really and essentially black because she self-identifies as black, and feels black on the inside.

Some social justice activists agree that she is, indeed, authentically black, and transracial identity is totally valid. Most do not. Many transgender people have written essays arguing that any claimed parallel between transracial and transgender identity is spurious. I’m sympathetic politically, but philosophically I think this is a hard case to make.7

Recognizing that gender can’t simply be wished away, I think it is reasonable to balk at the idea that someone is of a particular sex simply because they say so. On the other hand, recognizing that there is no objective fact about what sex anyone is, I think it is reasonable to agree that anyone who passes as a particular sex might as well be treated as being that sex for most purposes. Further, as far as those who present androgynously or as “none of the above,” we might do well to say “whatever!” and let them get on with it. One is entitled to disapprove of “deviants dressing wrong” privately, if that is your opinion, but eccentric attire is rarely adequate grounds for public censure. (“This nebulosity is not a cosmic problem!”) In all three cases, insisting that there is some Ultimate↗︎︎ Truth↗︎︎ of gender that must be obeyed is metaphysically unsupportable, and also seems petty.

It would help if we could agree that gender is a private matter, thereby restoring part of the public/private boundary that the countercultures destroyed. Although the public/private boundary is necessarily nebulous, other people’s ways of doing gender are mostly none of your business. This is obvious as a criticism of the right, but it applies equally to the left. For example, some leftists are harshly judgemental of women who choose to be supported by their husbands; this is wrong.

Sovereignty, borders, and war

The concept of a sovereign state was invented in the systematic era↗︎︎. Its Westphalian model↗︎︎ is an epitome of dualism. It holds that there are precisely-defined, permanent borders between states. Every square inch of land is part of exactly one state, and shall remain so eternally. The government of a state holds sway uniformly at every point within its borders. It has no right to exert any influence beyond its state borders.8

This is highly unnatural; choiceless era↗︎︎ kingdoms worked quite differently. Borders were mostly vague and shifting, and while the king’s rule may have been absolute in the capital, his power faded gradually, informally, with distance. The main job of a king was to meddle in the affairs of neighboring kingdoms, which led to wars and/or border adjustments.

The Westphalian system was invented to prevent war.9 The First World War marked the end of the systematic era, and the beginning of the era of crisis and social breakdown. Not only did Westphalian sovereignty fail to prevent the World Wars, it arguably caused them.

The dualistic Cold War profoundly shaped the countercultural era. Opposition to the Vietnam war—a proxy battle of the Cold War—was one of the main drivers of the monist (hippie/student radical) counterculture. The Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet military buildup was one of the main drivers of the dualist counterculture.

A monist approach would eliminate national boundaries. Wars are between states; without countries and borders between them, there could be no wars. Lennon’s lyrics for “Imagine↗︎︎” express this view; his last line, “the world will live as one,” is the epitome of monism. I do say he was a dreamer: countries and borders cannot be wished away.

Nor are they ever entirely hard and fast divisions. Many states attempted isolationism in the mid-20th-century, but it is impossible. Only North Korea even pretends now, and it is heavily dependent on China.

Beginning around the end of the countercultural era, which coincided with the end of the Cold War (1991), diplomats and international institutions quietly revised the system of international relations, to reflect the obvious reality that states and borders are patterned but nebulous. The European Union (1992) developed a model for blurred sovereignty, with borders that remain existent but enormously more permeable than previously. The World Trade Organization (1995), and the series of treaties it sponsored, greatly increased both the permeability and complex selectivity of borders. The Rwandan (1994) and Bosnian (1995) genocides changed the minds of many anti-war leftists, and de facto established the principle that the great powers have not only the right but the responsibility to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states to prevent humanitarian catastrophes. As dualists had always insisted, bad guys are bad and can’t be wished away; and wars can be fought for noble causes. More recently, failures in the Middle East have convinced many rightists that—as monists had always insisted—many wars cannot be won by military force.

Maybe it counts as success that in the current politics of the developed nations, global trade and immigration have mainly replaced war as the political issues concerned with borders.

This new era of international relations remains a work in progress, and probably always will. It has gotten many details wrong; but the principle that national borders are both nebulous and patterned is significant progress. As with gender, the meanings of national boundaries must be continually renegotiated, and interpreted in specific situations with reference to multiple ideologies. Almost everyone now does accept that national boundaries are both necessary and necessarily permeable. The Westphalian framework lingers as a ritual fiction; or as a subordinated system to which the new de facto non-systematic international relations are meta.

Popular ideologues sometimes talk as if totally open or closed borders were feasible options. And even the more careful pundits often frame the fight as quantitive: a more open border, or a harder one? Such rhetoric appeals to monist and dualist sensibilities, but is unrealistic, unhelpful, and nearly meaningless. Workable answers concern the complex pragmatic specifics of how borders operate. Which people, goods, services, money, and armies are allowed to cross, for what reasons?

Later in Meaningness and Time, I will discuss how the subcultural, atomized, and fluid modes regard nation-states.

  • 1. I’ve suggested tentatively that the culture war may be primarily about reproduction, with the rest mere decorative obfuscation. And, regulating gender roles seems to be mainly an indirect way of regulating reproduction.
  • 2. The word most is important. Suffering can be extreme for those who accept the nebulosity of their gender, but find it rejected by others; and for those who recoil from, and cannot accept, the nebulosity of their own gender, or that of people they care about.
  • 3. This account draws heavily both on ethnomethodology and on Kegan’s account of “stage 5↗︎︎” as context-responsive non-systematic activity that is meta to multiple formal systems.
  • 4. I’ve taken this trope from Scott Alexander’s “Five Case Studies On Politicization↗︎︎.”
  • 5. Gender essentialists include both some conservative Christians and some radical feminists, who have allied on many sexual deviance issues since the mid-1970s. I have to admit I find this very funny.
  • 6. The biochemical mechanisms that typically result in either a “male” or “female phenotype” are extremely complicated↗︎︎ and currently not fully understood. There is definitely no single “master factor” that determines maleness or femaleness in humans.
  • 7. All the attempts I read actually argued instead that claiming to be black when you were born apparently white is morally wrong, because you aren’t really black; whereas claiming to be female when you were born apparently male is not morally wrong, because you are really female. This simply assumes by fiat the conclusion it then claims to prove.
  • 8. The Westphalian scheme has never been descriptively accurate—never mind prescriptively adequate—even for the core European countries that invented and adopted it. The Channel Islands and Andorra are two entertaining anomalies. The Channel Islands↗︎︎ are legally part of Duchy of Normandy, which has not existed for many centuries. They are not part of the United Kingdom, although they are self-governing possessions of the British Crown, and Queen Elizabeth II is their Duke. (Not their Duchess. I imagine there is an excellent reason for this.) Islanders are legally both British citizens and EU citizens. The Channel Islands are legally part of the British Islands, but not part of the British Isles (please don’t confuse these!). They are not members of the European Union, but remain part of the European Community, which hasn’t existed since 1993, but which continues to grant them important legal trade rights from beyond the mortal veil. There’s much more, but it starts to get complicated. Andorra↗︎︎ is legally a Parliamentary Co-Principality, with the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell in Spain as Co-Princes. It is not part of either France or Spain. The President of France, ex officio Prince of Andorra, is a reigning monarch, unelected by his or her subjects (but elected by the French people). Then it gets complicated.
  • 9. It takes its name from the Peace of Westphalia↗︎︎, which ended the catastrophic Thirty Years War—Europe’s worst before WWI, with many millions left dead.

Subcultures: the diversity of meaning

Punks: the first mass elective subculture
Punks courtesy↗︎︎ Paul Townsend

The subcultural mode marked a fundamentally new approach to meaningness↗︎︎. It abandoned universalism—the delusion that meanings must be the same for everyone, everywhere, eternally. It recognized that different people are actually different, and need different cultures, societies, and psychologies.

The subcultural mode also created subsocieties: a new mode of social organization, intermediate between the family and state. Membership in subsocieties was voluntary, based on emotional affinity and cultural enjoyment, rather than ethnicity or geography. Subsocial organization began to resolve the problems of the self/society relationship that the countercultures tried, and failed, to renegotiate.

The first several pages of this chapter explore subcultural solutions: how subcultures addressed the problems of society, culture, and self that followed from the wreck of counterculturalism. These approaches were, I think, almost right.

However, they were also inadequate, and doomed. The remaining pages explain why the subcultural mode proved unworkable, and inevitably disintegrated into the atomized mode↗︎︎.

The fluid mode↗︎︎ will need to recover what worked in the subcultural mode, while addressing its flaws and limitations.

Subcultural solutions

Examples provide some intuitive understanding of subcultures: punk, Wicca, goth, anarcha-feminism, SF fandom, straight edge, BDSM, New Romantic.

Subcultures were not just hobbies or musical genres; they were ways of being. They provided the same kinds of life-meaning that the systematic and countercultural modes did—but more so. You were not stuck with the universalist monoculture of a nation; you could choose a subculture that was particularly meaningful for you. Ideally, they combined a distinctive artistic style, religion, politics, ethics, social role, belonging and identity.

Whereas the countercultures:

  1. failed to find new foundations for their universalist systems
  2. … and so were revealed as idealistically impractical
  3. failed to address the differences in people’s interests, values, purposes, and needs
  4. failed to provide strong social bonds—only membership in a nation-sized counterculture
  5. failed to transcend their oppositional (counter-cultural) attitude

Subcultures, in contrast:

  1. felt no need for foundations or justifications, having abandoned universalist claims
  2. made no attempt to solve the Big Problems of nation-sized societies and cultures
  3. affirmed and enhanced the diversity of interests, values, purposes, and needs
  4. provided strong social bonds within human-scale subsocieties of like-minded people
  5. were refuges from social conflict, because subcultures had no reason to oppose each other

Subcultural failure: boundary issues

Although subcultures still exist, they no longer function as they did during the subcultural era (1975-2000). It’s mostly no longer possible to rely on one to define your cultural, social, and personal identity.

Each subsociety created a boundary, between its members and the rest of the world. Each subculture also created a boundary: between its meanings and meanings that did not belong. Getting these boundaries right was critical, but difficult.

To function, the boundaries had to be somewhat permeable, but not too permeable. A subsociety needs to allow in a trickle of new members, to replace drop-outs and to allow for manageable growth. If the boundary is too rigid, the group will dwindle and collapse. If the boundary is too vague, members are not sufficiently committed, and also the group can suffer from dilution by mass immigration when its culture becomes popular.

A subculture needs to be somewhat open to new ideas, as a source of creative friction and innovation, but it also needs to maintain sufficient distinctiveness to avoid merging into others.

Subcultures and subsocieties also tended to schism, creating new internal divisions. The resulting, smaller sub-sub-cultures often lacked critical mass: enough talented people to create enough meaning.

The best size for a social group is a few hundred people: big enough to provide reliable support, but small enough that you can find a unique role, valued by all members. The best size for a culture is millions: enough to supply thick meanings for all dimensions of being.

This mismatch meant that either subcultures blew up into mass movements (as the most successful musical genres did) which offered little social support; or, if they remained small, the meanings they could provide were too narrow and too thin.

Finally, there were problems at the interface between the subculture or subsociety and nation-sized institutions such as the state, mainstream religions, and the market economy. Neither side understood the other’s needs, or even acknowledged the others’ legitimacy. States and religions sometimes persecuted subcultures as challenges to their authority; exploitation by the culture industry was often even more destructive.

On the other hand, subcultures did not even try to provide all the functions of large systematic institutions. That made the mode parasitic: a fully subcultural society is not possible, because subcultures and subsocieties cannot do the work of states or large corporations.1

Most subcultures and subsocieties had little awareness of these problems—much less adequate tools to address them. By around the year 2000, however, most people felt intuitively that subculturalism had failed.

After subculturalism

The atomized mode simply dropped the subculture and subsociety boundaries. Now everyone could access all culture, globally, through the internet. You didn’t have to be a member of a tribe to listen to a particular kind of music. You could take any shard of art and remix it with anything else.

Destroying the tiresome narrowness and shallowness of subculturalism gave an exhilarating sense of freedom. Not only could you take any meaning from anywhere (breadth), you could explore it in unprecedented depth.

Unfortunately, with boundaries gone, all coherence was lost. In the atomized mode, nothing makes sense. We live now in a world of decaying systematic institutions, facing atomized peoples, with mutual hostility, paranoia, and incomprehension.

The fluid mode, ideally, combines the strengths of all previous modes. Like the systematic mode, it should support nation-sized institutions, to provide necessary social, cultural, and physical infrastructure. Like the countercultural mode, it should support innovative cultural production that is wide, deep, and (like the subcultural mode) diverse. It should support close-knit, voluntary subsocieties of an optimal size. Like the atomized mode, it should allow everyone access to all cultural products.

  • 1. In “Archipelago,” I discuss a hypothetical model for how subcultures and nation-sized systems could have coexisted harmoniously, and supported each others’ proper roles. Unfortunately, this potential utopia was not attempted.

Subcultures: meanings at play

Steampunk image of girl with airship
Image courtesy↗︎︎ stephane

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

The subcultural mode of relating to meaningness↗︎︎ recognized what earlier modes↗︎︎ denied: that people are different, and different sorts of people flourish in different cultural and social surrounds.

The systematic↗︎︎ and countercultural↗︎︎ modes were universalist: they tried to force a single culture on everyone. To answer “why?,” they had to construct an eternalist↗︎︎ structure of justifications, supposedly founded on some ultimate cosmically correct principle↗︎︎.

Subculturalism abandoned all that. Steampunks had no interest in reforming society so that everyone would wear vernier goggles and ride in zeppelins. To the question “why steampunk?” there are only individual answers (“I’m into it because…”). Justifications turn on nebulous↗︎︎ aesthetic criteria (“ray guns are not strictly Victorian, but this one is brass”), not some absolutist Cosmic Plan↗︎︎.

There have been subcultures for as long as there have been cities. Mainly they were ethnic or sectarian. You were born into them; leaving and joining was difficult; there were only a handful in any place; and their influence on the mainstream culture was small.

In the 1980s, subculturalism exploded outward. The new subcultures were composed mainly of 20-somethings and were chosen freely. They multiplied dizzyingly, and replaced the countercultures as the mode of cultural innovation and production.

Freed from the demand to justify universal claims, many of the subcultures implicitly or explicitly abandoned eternalism↗︎︎. Some implicitly or explicitly embraced nihilism↗︎︎—notably, many in the early days of punk, the first subculture of the era.

The subcultures mostly also declared themselves free of responsibility for worrying about the Big Social Problems generated by the systematic mode. The countercultures arose as earnest attempts to solve those problems—and failed. Punk aggressively refused to offer any alternative. Later subcultures simply ignored them. Subcultures are about “us,” our deliberately human-scaled subsociety↗︎︎; not about “mundanes,” the society-at-large whose problems seem hopeless, or at any rate beyond our abilities.

Freed from responsibility, subculturalism is explicitly play. Unlike the countercultures, which took themselves Very Seriously, subcultures reveled in absurdity. This made for great art—in my opinion, as someone for whom the mode is more nearly native↗︎︎ than any of the others. It also enabled a welcome shift from sincerity to ritual↗︎︎, which started to resolve some of the pathologies of self, which systematicity produced and the countercultures failed to overcome.

Choosing to ignore the broader society and its problems made the subcultural mode parasitic. Someone else had to keep the machinery of civilization running while the subcultures played dress-up and make-believe. Failure to develop mutually-beneficial relationships with nation-scale institutions, and with individuals outside the subculture, contributed to the mode’s downfall. A nation cannot long persist if its best and brightest devote themselves to frivolities.

Fortunately, practicality and absurdity are not incompatible; the boundary between them is nebulous. The fluid mode↗︎︎ must combine playfulness and seriousness, ritual and sincerity, inseparably.

Archipelago: subcultural politics

Map of an imaginary archipelago
From Scott Alexander’s map of Raikoth↗︎︎, by permission

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

If subculturalism↗︎︎ had worked, Archipelago would have been its natural political expression. Understanding why each cannot work casts light on the other—and on how we can do better in the fluid mode↗︎︎.

I have stolen the term “Archipelago” from a brilliant essay by Scott Alexander, “Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism↗︎︎.” Mostly this page will encourage you to go read that. I’ll also give a bit of a summary, and draw out the connections with subculturalism (which he also made explicit, but not in as much detail).

(The nautical implications of “archipelago” also fit with the sea-of-meaningness trope I have stolen from Will Buckingham’s Finding Our Sea-Legs↗︎︎, which inspired my description of the “fluid mode↗︎︎” and my caricaturing the countercultures↗︎︎ as “wrecked galleons.”)

The ultra-condensed summary of Archipelago is this. People have radically different opinions about how society should be organized. Probably many of these ideas are right—for different sorts of people. So, ideally, everyone who wants to live in a fundamentalist theocracy can go do that, and everyone who wants to live in a socialist welfare state can go do that, and everyone who wants to live in rationalist capitalist minarchy can go do that. If we had many spare islands, each type of society could set up on a different one, and not step on each others’ toes. We don’t, so there would need to be an overarching governmental structure whose main job was to keep the different systems from interfering with each other.

As Alexander writes, Archipelago “doesn’t look like a practical solution for real problems.” However, “I do think it’s worth becoming more Archipelagian on the margin rather than less so, and that there are good ways to do it.”

I agree. So this page will use the Meaningness and Time framework to analyze the obstacles to Archipelagian developments, and to suggest possible approaches to working around them.

In terms of ideology (rather than practicalities) the principal obstacle is universalism. That is the idea that meanings must be the same for everyone, everywhere. The countercultures↗︎︎ both took universalism to an extreme, and spawned the culture war that has plagued us since.

The countercultural mode is native↗︎︎ for the Baby Boom generation. Currently, most major institutions (particularly governments) are led by Baby Boomers. Statistically, they are far more politically polarized than subsequent generations—because they are committed to universalism, and so to imposing their political vision on everyone else.

Over the next decade, Generation X will inherit control of states↗︎︎ and other major institutions from the Baby Boomers. The subcultural mode is native for Generation X—which suggests that politics may soon shift toward a more Archipelagian, and less polarized, model. I think this will be a good thing!

In the meantime, Gen X has been, famously, “waiting on the world to change↗︎︎.” Compared with both Boomers and Millennials, Generation X has tended to sit out politics—because their subcultural orientation has had no possibility of political implementation.

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

Mop
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Wikimedia

Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon.

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

(You can read very brief previews of my analysis of subculture dynamics in this table and/or this page.)

The muggles who invade and ruin subcultures come in two distinct flavors, mops and sociopaths, playing very different roles. This insight was influenced by Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle↗︎︎, an analysis of workplace dynamics. Rao’s theory is hideous, insightful nihilism↗︎︎; I recommend it.1

The birth of cool

Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.

The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.

Creators and fanatics are both geeks.2 They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.

If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.

If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops.3 Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.

Geeks welcome mops, at first at least. It’s the mass of mops who turn a scene into a subculture. Creation is always at least partly an act of generosity; creators want as many people to use and enjoy their creations as possible. It’s also good for the ego; it confirms that the New Thing really is exciting, and not just a geek obsession. Further, some money can usually be extracted from mops—just enough, at this stage, that some creators can quit their day jobs and go pro. (Fanatics contribute much more per head than mops, but there are few enough that it’s rarely possible for creatives to go full time with support only from fanatics.) Full-time creators produce more and better of the New Thing.

The mop invasion

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.

Fanatics may be generous, but they signed up to support geeks, not mops. At this point, they may all quit, and the subculture collapses.

The sociopath invasion

Unless sociopaths5 show up. A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital↗︎︎, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital↗︎︎: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.

The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.

Mops are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators. At this stage, they take their pick of the best-looking mops to sleep with. They’ve extracted the cultural capital.

The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay. Somehow, not much of the money goes to creators. However, more of them do get enough to go full-time, which means there’s more product to sell.

The sociopaths also hire some of the fanatics as actual service workers. They resent it, but at least they too get to work full-time on the New Thing, which they still love, even in the Lite version. The rest of the fanatics get pushed out, or leave in disgust, broken-hearted.

The death of cool—unless…

After a couple years, the cool is all used up: partly because the New Thing is no longer new, and partly because it was diluted into New Lite, which is inherently uncool. As the mops dwindle, the sociopaths loot whatever value is left, and move on to the next exploit. They leave behind only wreckage: devastated geeks who still have no idea what happened to their wonderful New Thing and the wonderful friendships they formed around it. (Often the geeks all end up hating each other, due first to the stress of supporting mops, and later due to sociopath divide-and-conquer manipulation tactics.)

Unless some of the creators are geniuses. If they can give the New Thing genuine mass appeal, they can ascend into superstardom. The subculture will reorganize around them, into a much more durable form. I won’t go into that in there. I will point out that this almost never happens without sociopaths. An ambitious creator may know they have mass-appeal genius, and could be a star, but very rarely do they know how to get from here to there.

Resistance

So what is to be done?

This is a geek question. The subculture lifecycle is a problem only from a geek perspective. As far as mops are concerned, it provides reliable, low-cost waves of novelty entertainment and casual social relationships. As far as sociopaths are concerned, it generates easily-exploited pools of prestige, sex, power, and money.

From a utilitarian point of view, mops hugely outnumber geeks, so in terms of total social value, it’s all good. Can’t make omelettes without breaking some eggheads.

So what is to be done?

Geeks can refuse to admit mops. In fact, successful subcultures always do create costly barriers to entry, to keep out the uncommitted.6 In the heyday of subcultures, those were called poseurs↗︎︎.7 Mop exclusion keeps the subculture comfortable for geeks, but severely limits its potential. Often there’s a struggle between geeks who like their cozy little club as it is, and geeks who want a shot at greatness—for themselves, or the group, or the New Thing. In any case, subculture boundaries are always porous, and if the New Thing is cool enough, mops will get in regardless.

The optimal mop:geek ratio is maybe 6:1. At that ratio, the mops provide more energy than they consume. A ratio above about 10:1 becomes unworkable; it’s a recipe for burnout among supporting fanatics. Ideally, the ratio could be controlled. I think few subcultures understand this imperative, and I’m not sure how it could be done even if one did understand. Mops move in herds. Usually either there are only a few, or their numbers quickly grow too large.

Sociopaths only show up if there’s enough mops to exploit, so excluding (or limiting) mops is a strategy for excluding sociopaths. Some subcultures do understand this, and succeed with it.

Alternatively, you could recognize sociopaths and eject them. Geeks may be pretty good at the recognizing, but are lousy at the ejecting. Mops don’t recognize sociopaths, and anyway don’t care. Mops have little investment in the subculture, and can just walk away when sociopaths ruin it. By the time sociopaths show up, mops are numerically most of the subculture. Sociopaths manipulate the mops, and it’s hard for the geeks to overrule an overwhelming majority.

Anyway, horribly, geeks need sociopaths—if the New Thing is ever going to be more than a geeky hobby, or a brief fad that collapses under the weight of the mop invasion.

So what is to be done?

Be slightly evil

The subcultural mode mostly ended around 2000. There still are subcultures, new ones all the time, but they no longer have the cultural and social force they used to. The “classical model” of subcultures no longer works, for the reasons given here, plus others I’ll describe in upcoming writing. I don’t think it can be rescued.

However, the fluid mode—my hoped-for future—resembles the subcultural mode in many ways. The same social dynamics may play out, unless there is a powerful antidote.

A slogan of Rao’s may point the way: Be slightly evil↗︎︎. Or: geeks need to learn and use some of the sociopaths’ tricks. Then geeks can capture more of the value they create (and get better at ejecting true sociopaths).

Specific strategies for sociopathy are outside the scope of this book. However, I have an abstract suggestion.

Rao concludes his analysis by explaining that his “sociopaths” are actually nihilists↗︎︎, in much the same sense as I use the word. Serious subcultures are usually eternalistic↗︎︎: the New Thing is a source of meaning that gives everything in life purpose. Eternalistic naïveté makes subcultures much easier to exploit.

“Slightly evil” defense of a subculture requires realism: letting go of eternalist hope and faith in imaginary guarantees that the New Thing will triumph. Such realism is characteristic of nihilism. Nihilism has its own delusions, though. It is worth trying to create beautiful, useful New Things—and worth defending them against nihilism. A fully realistic worldview corrects both eternalistic and nihilistic errors.

Combining what works in eternalism and nihilism amounts to the complete stance↗︎︎—which is essentially the same thing as the “fluid mode.”

  • 1.

    Rao postulates three groups in any organization: the Clueless, the Losers, and the Sociopaths. The Clueless mistakenly believe that the organization is actually supposed to do whatever it pretends to be for: selling widgets, saving endangered herons, or educating school-children, for instance. They are dedicated to this mission and work hard, and creatively, to further it. The Losers have a job because they need a paycheck; their motivation is to make work reasonably pleasant in exchange for minimal effort. The Sociopaths recognize the reality that the organization is just the setting for a power game played among themselves. Nobody really cares about widgets, herons, or other people’s children. The Losers also understand this, but don’t have what it takes to play the game.

    In subcultures, Geeks are roughly parallel to the Clueless; they are passionate about whatever the subculture is supposedly about. Mops substitute for Losers: they show up for a reasonably pleasant time in exchange for minimal effort. Sociopaths are Sociopaths. The detailed dynamics are rather different, though; for instance, the Gervais Principle says that organizations begin with Sociopaths and end up with mostly Clueless, whereas subcultures begin with Geeks and end with mostly Mops.

  • 2. I’m using “geek” here to mean “someone fascinated by the details of a subject most people don’t care about.” There’s another sense of “geek,” meaning the sort of person you’d expect to find at a science fiction convention. There’s significant overlap, but in the first sense there are gardening geeks and golfing geeks, and most probably aren’t geeks in the second sense. They might create gardening subcultures, though.
  • 3. “MOP” is an abbreviation for “member of the public”; it seems to be fairly common in Britain. My American (mis-)use of it here is probably somewhat non-standard. Other terms that could be used are “casuals” or “tourists.”
  • 4. All the categories here—creators, fanatics, mops, sociopaths—are necessarily nebulous↗︎︎: ambiguous and changing over time. There is no “fact of the matter” about whether someone is an unusually enthusiastic mop, or a fanatic who is less committed than some other fanatics; nor whether someone who creates occasionally but mainly acts to support the subculture counts as a fanatic or creator. Anyone may shift roles, too.
  • 5. I am using “sociopath” here in Rao’s informal sense, not a technical, clinical one.
  • 6. I’ll discuss these barriers more extensively in upcoming writing.
  • 7. “Poseur” was perhaps directed even more at sociopaths than mops, but didn’t clearly distinguish between the two.

Atomization: the kaleidoscope of meaning

Gangnam Style! What’s it about?

(Who knows!)

Gangnam Style! What genre is it?

(Who cares!)

In our present, atomized mode of meaningness↗︎︎, cultures, societies, and selves cannot hold together. They shatter into tiny jagged shards. We shake the broken bits together, in senseless kaleidoscopic, hypnotic reconfigurations, with no context or coherence.

This may sound like a problem. Overall, my description of the atomized mode may sound like a panicked condemnation. However, there is much to like about atomization, and—I will suggest—it provides vital resources for constructing the next, fluid↗︎︎ mode.

Atomized culture

The previous, subcultural↗︎︎ mode failed because individual subcultures did not provide enough breadth or depth of meaning; and because cliquish subsocieties made it too difficult to access the narrow meaningness they hoarded.

The global internet exploded that. Everything is equally available everywhere—which is fabulous! Now, there are no boundaries, so bits of culture float free. Unfortunately, with no binding contexts, nothing makes sense. Meanings arrive as bite-sized morsels in a jumbled stream, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

With no urge for context to make culture understandable, everything is equally appealing everywhere. The atomized mode returns to the universalism of the countercultural mode↗︎︎—but by default, rather than design. In the 1960s, for the first time, everyone in an American generation listened to the same music, regardless of genre—as an expression of solidarity. Now, everyone in the world listens to the same music, regardless of genre, again—just because it’s trending on YouTube.

Gangnam Style has been watched 2.9 billion times on YouTube.1 Even counting repeat views, it’s probably well-known to most young people on the planet. Its genre is, in fact, K-pop; but may be the only K-pop song most Westerners have ever heard.

Genre—which defined many subcultures—has disintegrated. Atomization seemed at first like subculturalism taken to an extreme, but it is a qualitatively new mode. K-pop may be a subculture in Korea, but in America it’s just YouTube. It’s normal for a Top 40 hit to mash up country-style pedal steel guitar with bubble-gum-pop vocals, hip-hop rapping, EDM bass, and black metal blast beats. “Authenticity”—the aesthetic ideal of subculturalism—is impossible because there are no standards to be authentic to.

In atomized culture, intensity—shock, novelty, extremes—substitutes for structure. There are no systematic principles for comparing value, so immediate emotional appeal trumps formal qualities. The avant garde has finally expired as an irrelevant archaism. Duchamp couldn’t out-irreverence or out-peculiar Psy.

Atomized society

In atomization, the subcultural mode’s local communities cannot hold together, because they no longer deliver adequate meaning. The subcultural solution to the problems of self and society—intermediate-scale subsocieties that buffer individuals from national institutions—failed.

Instead, society moves onto global interactive media. Internet social networks support larger, geographically dispersed virtual communities. You no longer need to be in the happening place to get access to a genre or scene. You may not know the gender, race, or nationality of some of your closest friends. It is wonderful to find people who share your nearly-unique interests—but can online relationships replace in-person ones? Can electronic communities provide the same benefits as local ones?

The vestiges of systematic↗︎︎ social organization are crumbling. As culture and society atomize, it becomes impossible to maintain a coherent ideology. Religions decohere into vague “spirituality,” and political isms give way to bizarre, transient, reality-impaired online movements. Decontextualized, contradictory, intensely-proclaimed religious and political “beliefs” displace legacy systems of meaning. These are not beliefs in an ordinary sense, but advertisements↗︎︎ of personal qualities and tribal identification. The atomized mode generates paranoia, because without the systematic mode’s “therefores,” its structure of justification, there are no memetic defenses against bad ideas.

Atomized politics abandons the outdated convention that political arguments should make sense. Occupy, the Tea Party, ISIS, the “tumblr SJW” and “alt-right” social media movements, and the 2016 American Presidential campaign ignored “therefore” in favor of claims that were false and absurd, but not duplicitous, because they were not intended to be believed—just reacted to for their intense emotional impact.

Legacy systematic institutions—especially states—find themselves increasingly unable to cope with the rate of change, or to adapt to an environment of pervasive incoherence. This leaves cracking systems of government facing atomized populations, mutually uncomprehending because of their different modes of processing meaning, producing increasingly intense paranoia on both sides. States are starting to fail, as parts of the world become ungovernable. Others are abandoning democracy for authoritarianism, in desperate attempts to hold social structures together.

Atomized self

Woman looking through a kaleidoscope
Giant kaleidoscope image courtesy↗︎︎ Bill Whittaker

We build selves by internalizing meanings from our culture and from social relationships. As culture and society atomize, we are bombarded with a kaleidoscopic chaos of brightly-colored atoms of meaning, and it becomes impossible to construct or maintain a coherent self.

The unity of self that was a reality in the choiceless mode↗︎︎, and a promised (but impossible) ideal in the systematic↗︎︎ and countercultural↗︎︎ modes, is a forgotten fairy tale. The subcultural mode↗︎︎ reluctantly accepted personal fragmentation, but sought, anxiously, to manage it. The atomized mode is comfortable with a self that is a rushing jumbled stream, like the society and culture it internalizes.

A “stage 4↗︎︎” self is a system of principles and projects that structure all the details of one’s internal world, and that resolve priority conflicts among values, tasks, and relationships. This is impossible in the atomized mode.

The always-on internet delivers massively more interruptions, entertainments, relationships, and chores than humans evolved for. Even a relational, “stage 3↗︎︎” self is atomized into a turbulent stream of interaction, because relationships are electronically mediated.

“Authenticity” of self, like authenticity of culture, becomes meaningless when there is no “thine own” to be true to. When it’s obviously impossible to form a systematic self, the task is to surf your own incoherence. Increasingly, this is a practical problem, not an existential threat. We are gradually building skill at it—and this points toward the fluid mode↗︎︎, which accepts incoherence, but can also discover and build patterns↗︎︎ within it.

Pathologies of atomization: the new problems of meaningness

In the countercultural mode, as mainstream meanings imploded, finding new foundations for meaning seemed the most urgent problem of meaning. We’ve long since abandoned that quest. The problems we face now are quite different. I will devote a full page↗︎︎ to them later, and have mentioned some above.

Overall, the problem is that without structures and boundaries, shards of meaning do not relate to each other, so it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial—or equally earth-shaking, or equally threatening. Our lives are so full of so many tiny tasty things, and so many crises and outrages, that it may all fail to add up to much.

The loss of coherence, of “therefore,” gives a misimpression of nihilism↗︎︎, of meaninglessness. In the atomized mode, though, there’s overwhelming quantities of meaning. We suffer from FOMO,2 browser tab explosions, and Facebook trance. Projects, creativity, and fundamental values suffer when they are challenged by cacophonous internet alerts a million times a day.

Meanings no longer fit together to point anywhere. This resembles the choiceless↗︎︎ (“traditional”) mode, which also feels no need for grand unified schemes that make everything make sense. In both modes, incoherence—the lack of large-scale structures of meaning—does not particularly seem a problem. We can navigate locally anyway.

The difference is that we now need to manage hugely more complexity, diversity, volume, and urgency of meanings. Individuals can get by in the atomized world without coherent understanding. Societies cannot.

Civilization still needs large systematic institutions—states, corporations, markets, universities—to survive. The atomized mode corrodes the social systems we depend on. Some are nearing collapse. I do not know whether people who grew up in that mode, and disdain systematicity, can keep the machinery of civilization running.

After the atomized mode

The atomized mode is actually impossible. No one is entirely incapable of understanding “therefore,” of coordinating meanings, or ranking values. As I explained at the beginning of this history of meaningness, all the modes are merely “ideal types”: simplified extremes that cannot exist in the real world.

In reality, we have always been in the fluid mode↗︎︎, because complete choicelessness is impossible; totally consistent systems are impossible; and absolute atomization is impossible. Eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎ are impossible; we always know better. The fluid mode recognizes that structures of meaning are valuable but always nebulous↗︎︎; systems are powerful but always incomplete.

We have always been in the fluid mode, but now at last we are in a position to recognize it. Now, at last, we have the cultural, social, and psychological resources we need to get good at it. Atomization supplies the critical realization that perfect coherence is neither necessary nor even desirable. Fluidity builds on that, to re-form systems as relative tools rather than eternal absolutes.

  • 1. In late 2016, as I’m publishing this page, Gangnam Style might seem a quaintly old-fashioned choice for an example of atomized culture. Does anyone even remember it? I wrote the first draft of this page in early 2013, when Gangnam Style was everywhere. In 2016, it is temping to replace it with an up-to-date example. However, that would equally be ancient history in 2019. I hope people will still be reading Meaningness then. Short of rewriting the page every few weeks, it’s inevitable that any example of contemporary culture will be obsolete by the time you read it.
  • 2. Fear Of Missing Out.

Not a good decade for thinking

Sushi and sake
A fabulous decade for eating and drinking, though

The atomization↗︎︎ of culture—its loss of logical or even aesthetic coherence—has made serious intellectual work much more difficult than it was twenty years ago. Significant new ideas are scarce. We understand that systems↗︎︎ of meaning, which used to be the vehicle for thought, are no longer credible.

We are only beginning, tentatively, to develop alternative ways of thinking. These acknowledge both nebulosity↗︎︎ (which undercuts conceptual systems) and pattern↗︎︎ (which makes accurate thought possible).

I wrote the following in January, 2014, as a casual rant, and posted it in a private forum. It alluded to ideas about atomization that I only began publishing here in 2016. Now, in early 2017, those may seem obvious features of your Facebook feed—rather than recondite theories which I developed, haltingly, years ago. As I am still making slow progress in polishing text for publication: here is the rant.

Raw. Perhaps the style suits the subject...

text separator

My girlfriend asked me over dinner: “So, where is the most exciting thinking happening now?”

That was a puzzler. After I stalled by saying “In my head, mostly,” and we traded various jokes about arrogance and narcissism, I had to admit that I couldn’t think of any. (We had both drunk rather a lot of sake, which is still affecting me, or I wouldn’t post something like this.)

“Maybe this isn’t a good time for thinking,” I said.

Which seemed accurate to her; but we agreed it was odd.

There are, of course, good and bad places and times for thinking. Athens in 450 BC was a famously good time. England in 700 CE was not.

The Manhattan Project was a good place and time to think—about atomic bombs, at least.

I was at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab through the 1980s. It was self-consciously similar to the Manhattan Project. Public expectations for AI were at an all-time high.1 We had unlimited funding from the Department of Defense. The lab selected ferociously smart students and staff. (In 1982, there were 2000 applicants for each available position as a graduate student.) Human-level computer intelligence was just around the corner.

Not.

That was a failed Manhattan Project. We had brilliant, fascinating, innovative theories, all of which were utterly wrong. It seemed like a fabulous place to think, but the intellectual culture was subtly broken, and we were all fooling ourselves.

Still, the 1980s overall were an exciting time. Molecular biology was taking off. My best friend was doing something important with molecular genetics at Harvard. (I can’t remember what.) I did a bunch of graduate-level coursework in that stuff, ’cuz it was so cool.

Also, the whole French post-structuralist thing was happening, which (like AI) was mostly flashy theories about nothing, but it felt like fireworks at the time.

So mostly that was a failure, but molecular biology was real. On the other hand… biology turned into “normal science” (i.e. routine crank-turning). Hard to be excited about it now.2

So what was the last exciting thing to happen in the world of ideas? Evopsych was exciting for about six months ten or fifteen years ago. But once you’d got your head around its few key ideas, the rest was obvious deductions. Verifying the details has become normal science again.

Some of us here are thirsty for “insight porn”… and there’s little to be had. Maybe it’s only sold under the counter and I’m too naive to find it. Or maybe I’m old and jaded; or my brain has rotted and I wouldn’t recognize an insight if it bit me in the hippocampus.

“So if you went back to MIT, would you find no interesting conversations there?” my girlfriend asked.

I don’t know—I haven’t hung around a university in twenty years. But I figure if anything was happening—other than normal science—I’d hear about it eventually. And I ain’t hearing nothin’.

So maybe you will humor me (since I’m drunk) and will allow, for the sake of the argument, that this is not a good decade for thinking.

Why not?

Well, I have a theory.

It’s a weak inference from a broader story about what is happening in our general global culture. I really truly intend to write that up properly Any Day Now.3

The theory starts from the fact that we are in the post-systems era. That isn’t my idea, it’s standard-issue 1980s French stuff—one of the few things they actually got right.

The problem is, mostly the only model we have for scarily smart people to express insights is to build conceptual systems. But those don’t work no more.

The not-really-all-that-smart people haven’t noticed that yet, and are still building systems, which is lame. (We can roll our eyes at anyone who comes up with a conceptual system. Nothing needs to actually be said, because that’s just so 20th century.)

So what do the scarily smart people do? They trade absurdly erudite jokes about nothing on twitter and complain about the scarcity of insight porn. (Not mentioning any names here. You know who you are.)

Then what?

Well, according to my theory (which looks distressingly like a conceptual system…) the next stage in cultural evolution is disposable assemblages. To quote myself:4

Finding or creating a consistent, coherent, universal culture, society, or self is NOT our task; that is the doomed dream of modernism.

Our new spiritual task is to devise diverse watercraft for sailing the turbulent seas of meaning. Not great -isms, but elegant windjammers.

Ships that sail the seas of meaning must be: collaborative; creative; improvised; intimate; disposable; beautiful; and spiritual.

Less poetically, meaningness↗︎︎-crafts are fluid, shared structures that organize meanings in ways that foreground whatever matters most.

This is what we are not yet good at. It’s a new requirement.

Until we learn how to build such craft, the present will remain… a lousy time for thinking.

  • 1. Since I wrote this, the late-eighties AI hype wave has been surpassed by a new late-twenty-teens AI hype wave.
  • 2. I wrote this shortly before I learned about CRISPR↗︎︎, which may end old age, sickness, and death. That could be quite interesting.
  • 3. Hold your breath! Definitely. Any day now.
  • 4. This was in a series of tweets in 2013.

Fluidity: a preview

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page (when written) will sketch a preview of the fluid mode. It will be only a preview, because most of Meaningness and Time will be about the fluid mode. This page specifically relates fluidity to its history: its evolution out of recent previous modes of meaningness↗︎︎.

One way of expressing fluidity is to say that cultural conditions are now right for understanding and acceptance of the complete stance↗︎︎. There is a widespread tacit understanding that social, cultural, and psychological systems do not “work,” and cannot “work,” if “work” involves any sort of guarantee. In other words, eternalism↗︎︎ is unworkable. There is also widespread tacit understanding that nihilism↗︎︎ is unworkable (and, in fact, silly↗︎︎). The atomized mode↗︎︎ ideally dissolves all patterns↗︎︎, which is obviously impossible. So tacitly we all understand that meaning must be both nebulous and patterned—and this is exactly the complete stance. “The fluid mode” consists of working out what that may mean for society, culture, and self.

The fluid mode goes meta on the previous modes. That is, it understands meaning as a dynamic process of evolution through social, cultural, and psychological change. It recognizes all the problems that the previous modes tried to solve, synthesizes what was right in each attempt. It also abandons what was wrong in each.

The countercultures wrongly rejected rationality, because the systematic mode↗︎︎ had absolutized it. The subcultures rejected universalism—rightly, but absolutely, which made nation-scale structures impossible. Atomization made coherence impossible, which could become disastrous. During the eras of these three modes, rational, large-scale, coherent systems became increasingly inconceivable—but without them, civilization is impossible.

The fluid mode must reinstate rationality, universality, and coherence, but with recognition of their nebulosity. In fluidity, systems are relativized, not eliminated.

The fluid mode follows the atomized one. Atomization’s great contribution is an instinctive appreciation of nebulosity. At an intuitive, kinesthetic level, we have all become much more comfortable with ambiguity, chaos, uncertainty, and volatility. What’s missing is an understanding of how pattern arises:

  • impermanently
  • creatively
  • biologically
  • collaboratively
  • spontaneously
  • in dependence on the non-human realm

Atomization bears new problems of meaningness: the overwhelming torrent of meaning spewed by the internet; its triviality, causing distraction from value judgements; and perceived tensions between internet and “real life.”

Atomization is a fact; it can’t be reversed. The question to ask is “how can we live enjoyably and effectively in a world in which society, culture, and self are atomized?” Part of the answer is: by constructing temporary assemblages of greater meaning—while recognizing that they can’t be answers or eternal↗︎︎ or ultimate↗︎︎ or universal or any of those obsolete absolutes.

Fluidity addresses atomization’s defects with watercraft that sail the sea of meanings. (This nautical metaphor will get quite complex, I’m afraid!) These ships must be collaborative, creative, improvised, intimate, transient, beautiful, playful, and spiritual.

Modes of meaningness, eternalism and nihilism

The diagram below summarizes the historical motions of modes of meaningness↗︎︎.

Time flows from top to bottom. The horizontal axis locates modes with respect to eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎—the denials↗︎︎ of the nebulosity↗︎︎ and patterns↗︎︎ of meaningness↗︎︎.

Diagram showing the motion of modes of meaningness with respect to eternalism and nihilism, over time

The details of this chart should not be taken too seriously. In particular, relative horizontal motions are meant to be meaningful, but not their absolute positions. For instance, the fluid mode↗︎︎ (“Waterworld”) should be less nihilistic than the atomized↗︎︎ mode (“Kaleidoscope”), but trying to locate it relative to the subcultural mode↗︎︎ probably makes no sense. I have, however, put the fluid mode exactly in the center, to indicate that it should avoid both eternalism and nihilism.

The black lines with crosses on them indicate opposition. In both cases, there’s influence as well as conflict. Philosophical nihilism did flow into the “late modern mainstream” of the 1950s, although that was denied. The dualist↗︎︎ “Moral Majority” counterculture↗︎︎ borrowed heavily from the monist↗︎︎ “hippie” counterculture, although it mostly didn’t admit that. In fact, every mode of meaningness has taken pieces from every past and contemporary one. Creating meaning is hard, and great artists steal whenever they can.

The atomized kaleidoscopic mode is furthest over toward nihilism (not counting philosophical nihilism, which is mainly theoretical). However, full nihilism denies all meaning; whereas the problem in the atomized mode is more that there is too much meaning, than too little. It has just lost the coherence of pattern, and so becomes senseless and overwhelming.

Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness

Underwater fantasy

“Fluidity” is a positive vision for the future of society, culture, and our selves. Visions may be inspiring, but they’re useless unless they respect present realities. My conception of fluidity emerges from an analysis of the successes and failures of recent modes of meaningness↗︎︎.

This page, then, is the turning point of Meaningness and Time: from the recent past and present to the near future. It both looks back, extracting lessons from How meaning fell apart, and looks forward, sketching a nebulous preview of Sailing the seas of meaningness.

(If you have not read How meaning fell apart, it will help to read its overview, or to look at the summary chart. They explain how each mode attempted to solve problems of meaning the previous ones created, and how each was partly successful but eventually failed.)

The fluid mode should deliver the benefits of each previous mode, while minimizing the problems each created:

Is this possible? I think so—and the rest of Meaningness and Time sketches how.

Our tool for analyzing modes of meaningness, and for constructing the fluid mode, is the complete stance↗︎︎. That recognizes the inseparability of nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎, and thereby avoids the errors of both eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎. It particularly recognizes the nebulosity and pattern of boundaries and connections, and thereby avoids the errors of monism↗︎︎ and dualism↗︎︎. These four confused stances↗︎︎ account for most of the failures of the existing modes.

Metasystematicity is closely related to the complete stance. It is the attitude that systems of meaning↗︎︎ are of great value (because meaning is patterned), but none can be complete or fully correct (because meaning is nebulous). Instead, we must deploy multiple systems, comprehend and negotiate the conflicts and synergies among them, and be willing to act even when no system can guide us.

Because systems emerge in particular social, cultural, and psychological circumstances, metasystematicity requires a historical perspective: an understanding of how meaningness develops through time. That was the aim of How meaning fell apart.

Here I ask: which aspects of these previous modes of meaningness are worth rescuing from historical oblivion, and how must they be transformed to function effectively as the future comes into focus?

Overview

We can understand the countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes as attempts to address the defects of the systematic mode, and to restore lost benefits of choicelessness. They successively rejected three of systems’ key principles: rationality, universality, and coherence. These principles contribute to the oppressive rigidity of the systematic mode, because it takes them as eternalistic absolutes. Jettisoning them brought significant benefits. Unfortunately, each anti-systematic move was also, in part, regressive: walking back in longing for the choiceless mode.

Rationality, universality, and coherence contribute to systems’ beneficial functioning. Since the breakdown of the systematic mode, rational, large-scale, coherent systems have become increasingly inconceivable. Unfortunately, without them, civilization is impossible. A collapse of our legacy systems, under assault from anti-rational, anti-universal, anti-coherent myopia, would be catastrophic.

The fluid mode must restore all three principles, but in relativized forms that recognize their inseparable nebulosity and pattern. This requires a better understanding of the nature of meaningness—which I hope Meaningness, the book, supplies.

This page suggests that the fluid mode should:

  • Simulate choiceless community, providing social and cultural structures that allow us to live as if in a close-knit traditional tribe, but with the benefits of a postindustrial civilization.
  • Relativize systems, restoring respect for their aesthetic elegance and practical effectiveness, while dispelling their foundational certainties so they can accommodate alternatives.
  • Enjoy mass-culture creativity, as in the countercultures: appreciating their optimistic visions, their motivating drive, and their thickness and breadth of meaning.
  • Rework subsociety boundaries, so they provide diverse communities for diverse people, without parasitizing larger-scale cultural and social structures.
  • Embrace atomization, the technology-driven force that makes nebulosity inescapably obvious, and develop better cultural, social, and psychological tools for finding sense within it.

These are desiderata: mere hopes and wishes. Sailing the seas of meaningness explains how the fluid mode may work. It is not structured in terms of previous modes of meaningness—although it takes them as background. This page extracts principles from the history, so we will rarely require further reference to it.

Simulate choiceless community

Nearly all humans have had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We lived in wandering clans, of a dozen to a few score, which were parts of wider tribes of a few hundreds or thousands. Some anthropologists say we spent about four hours a day working, which was enough to meet all material needs. Everyone’s work was recognized as meaningful and valuable by everyone else. Most of the rest of the time was spent in enjoyable cultural and social activities. Band membership was elective (chosen): if you didn’t get along with one, you could usually join another.

This sounds like a good deal to me! It seems that such a highly-meaningful, socially supportive, leisure-filled life would feel right, because our brains evolved for it.

It is a utopian fantasy, though, unless we also admit the nasty, brutish, and short aspects of hunter-gatherer life. Not just the material poverty, but the social and cultural narrowness: like being stuck with your middle-school clique, listening to the same twenty dumb songs, for your entire life. Having choices is usually good. Personal development beyond communal values↗︎︎, into more sophisticated ways of being, is good for those who can manage it.

Can’t we have the benefits without the limitations? Especially, can’t we get the benefits of both the choiceless (traditional, communal, premodern) and systematic (bureaucratic, rational, modern) modes?

Cultures and societies may function well just to the extent that they manage that. We can’t go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, even if we wanted to. But we can provide substitutes for its key features, or “simulations” that give similar benefits. In fact, every subsequent mode has worked partly by doing that:

The countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes can all be seen as attempts to compromise between the choiceless and systematic modes, or to combine their benefits. Why is this so urgently necessary?

In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life↗︎︎, by the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, suggests an answer. To make sense of life within systematic society, you have to build a systematic self. Otherwise, the expectations of modern institutions seem arbitrary, selfish, cruel, and deranged. Unfortunately, empirical studies find that only a minority of people in modern societies manage to create such selves. The majority are, in Kegan’s words, “developmentally traditional people in a modern world.” Friction from this mismatch causes great stress, especially in work life and in dealing with state institutions.

Society should work for as many people as possible. It certainly should work for the majority—who are not currently capable of coping with systematicity. That would mean they could live “as if” in the choiceless mode.

I hope the fluid mode will create a deliberately developmental society, based on a recognition that people vary in capacity. Ideally:

  • Societies and cultures should provide the feelings of belonging, security, and coherent, shared meanings we found in hunter-gatherer bands.
  • They should make material abundance available to all, with relatively little effort, with no requirement to conform to elaborate systematic demands.
  • There should be a clearly-marked path for personal development↗︎︎ beyond the communal mode. It should encourage and reward those who pursue it—but not penalize or denigrate those who can’t, or choose not to.

This is a tall order. Fulfilling it completely is not feasible with our current material technology and economy, nor with available social and cultural “technologies.” However, that is not required for the initial transition to the fluid mode. It’s a longer-term goal. Each previous mode’s way of simulating choicelessness also depended on innovations in technology, economics, social organization, and culture, so this is nothing new.

Although progress is never guaranteed, virtually unlimited material abundance seems plausible in a few decades. That would enable new economic arrangements, such as a “guaranteed basic income,” for example. That would have social and cultural consequences that we can only speculate about—but which it would be good to start preparing for.

An immediate transition to abundance might result in a catastrophic crisis of meaning: what would everyone do all day? In the absence of close community and participatory culture, perhaps most people would spend their time watching TV, and experiencing the symptoms of nihilism—depression, rage, and anxiety—because life without imposed structure seems meaningless.

Relativize systems

The systematic mode asked: how can we do things better? And its answer was: by building knowledge up from rational foundations. That led to Renaissance art, the scientific revolution, constitutional democracy, internet cat videos↗︎︎, and most everything else that makes life better for us than for subsistence farmers.

Although rationalist epistemology worked astonishingly well for centuries, it is not actually correct. Nebulosity is unavoidable, and ultimate foundations are impossible. Attempts to force nebulous reality to fit rigid systems inevitably fail. And before failing, they result in alienation, anomie, totalitarianism, existentialism, and other such evils.

These problems led the three following modes to abandon the three epistemological principles of rationality, universality, and coherence. Accordingly, the countercultures proposed unrealistic reforms to soften systematicity; the subcultures carved parts of life away from the systematic matrix, but remained parasitic on it; and the atomized mode is simply oblivious to it.

Those developments were mainly steps backward, although the post-systematic modes were right that rationality had failed. Despite that, the systematic mode’s epistemology is more sophisticated than both those of the choiceless mode and those of the post-systematic modes. Rationality powers its elegance and effectiveness.

As with the choiceless mode, we should ask: How do we get the benefits of systematicity without the costs?

I will suggest this is possible, in the fluid mode, by adopting a meta-rational epistemology. Meta-rationality retains the virtues of systematic rationality, but also incorporates an understanding of nebulosity and pattern. Abandoning the futile quest for absolute foundations, it enables forms of flexibility the systematic mode lacked. It allows multiple interpenetrating systems to co-exist, without demanding that all apparent conflicts be resolved in favor of one or another. Meta-rationality treats rationality, universality, and coherence as often-valuable tools, not as cosmic absolutes.

Meta-rationality is cognitively challenging:

  • “Developmentally traditional people in the modern world” are not competent in systematic rationality. They cannot understand the question “how can we get the benefits of systematicity without the costs”—because they are blind to its beneficial operation. As far as they are concerned, safe drinking water, impartial courts, and cat videos might as well rain from heaven.

  • Those who have progressed to a systematic worldview, but no further, cannot believe the question has an answer, because they cannot imagine the possibility of anything better. The only alternatives appear to be a return to communal irrationality, or a nihilistic↗︎︎ breakdown. This makes them willfully blind to systematicity’s costs.

Building a meta-systematic society and culture, when few people can follow meta-rational explanations, will be difficult. Nevertheless, I will suggest ways it may be possible. I will also suggest ways of making meta-rational understanding more broadly available. A clearly-marked path from personal systematicity to meta-systematicity is a further requirement for a deliberately developmental society.

In a sense, that is the project of Meaningness overall! But I will make more specific pedagogical proposals as well.

Enjoy the creativity and vision of mass culture

The systematic mode had an attractively optimistic vision: that we could do everything right, which would solve all problems. This vision was discredited by the endless catastrophes and breakdowns of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

The countercultures provided alternative optimistic visions. Those enabled a wave of delightful cultural creativity. Their universalism implied that “we, nationally or globally, are all in this together.” That gave them the critical mass of innovators needed to develop a panoply of new thick and wide meanings, attractive to tens or hundreds of millions of people.

Unfortunately, the universalism of the countercultures meant that their social reforms failed. People differ, and need different social, cultural, and personal arrangements. The fluid mode must recognize that. The countercultures’ anti-rationality also resulted in failure: their alternative, optimistic visions were wildly unrealistic.

Unlike the countercultures, the two subsequent modes have been unable to provide thick, broad, and positive culture. The essence of subculturalism was the rejection of mass-scale culture—which allowed creative diversity, but usually failed to achieve the scale↗︎︎ needed to provide sufficient thickness and breadth of meaning. The atomized mode does resemble the countercultural mode in producing culture with global appeal, but its incoherence results in triviality, whereas the countercultures’ depth of meaning grew from coherent visions.

The subcultural and atomized modes also lost the countercultures’ optimism, and often slid into Lite Nihilism. As of 2017, most people in developed societies expect the future to be pretty much the same as the present, except worse. The possibility of a positive vision is met with derisive cynicism. This is understandable, as due to the collapse of eternalism↗︎︎, which had underwritten the belief in progress. But it is unfortunate and unprecedented.

How can we engender optimistic cultural creativity, like that of the countercultures—without their anti-rational idiocy, destructive antagonism, and totalitarian universalism?

In the fluid mode, this requires:

  1. Recovering a relativized rationality.
  2. Adopting the complete stance↗︎︎ of participation↗︎︎, which resolves the opposition of monism and dualism. I explained how in “Completing the countercultures↗︎︎.”
  3. Recognizing the nebulosity and pattern of both universalism and particularism. I’ll sketch that in the next section of this page.

As for the first point: meta-rationality is the antidote to countercultural anti-rationality, as well as to systematic rationalist eternalism. Two partly-correct observations motivate anti-rationalism: that rationalism implies oppressive systematic rigidity, and that it implies nihilism.

  • By recognizing the nebulosity of meaningness, meta-rationality loosens up absolutist, rationalist systems.
  • By recognizing the patterning of meaningness, meta-rationality refutes and dispels nihilism.

Fluid social institutions and culture can grow from this understanding.

Rework subsociety boundaries

The subcultural mode abandoned universality, in favor of rigorous particularism. Different subcultures provided different bodies of meaning, suitable for different sorts of people. Finding the right subculture let you “be yourself.” Finding the right subsociety gave you a feeling of “coming home to my own people, at last.” This new mode provided a much better—nearly customized—self/society fit than the systematic and countercultural ones could.

Not needing to justify any universal claims, subcultures no longer had a use for any eternal rock of certainty. They maintained coherence thematically, with aesthetic judgements and with ritual, rather than with a foundational structure of justifications. This put them on track toward the complete stance: neither eternalist nor nihilist. Many subcultures did abandon eternalism—tacitly, at least—and most avoided nihilism.

Freed from pompous eternalism and dour nihilism, subcultures became explicitly play. Steampunk is deliberately ridiculous, and not meant to be taken seriously. But it is also not trivial genre entertainment, as it may appear to outsiders. The subcultures began to explore the possibility that seriousness and playfulness are not mutually exclusive. That inseparability should be a major, explicit aspect of the fluid mode.

Subculturalism enabled a new kind of creativity. Punks called it “DIY” (do it yourself): they rejected the resources of the culture industry, to escape its exploitative power. But “yourself” was an individualist self-misunderstanding. The tacit realization was that we make meaning together, as a subsociety, or “scene.” The meanings we make are meant just for us.

Functional communities range from dozens to thousands of people. When a subculture gained an audience of millions, the subsocieties that produced it exploded in size, became dysfunctional, and disintegrated.

Recognizing the problem, subsocieties found ways to limit membership. One strategy was to avoid mass appeal by making the subculture increasingly esoteric and repellent to outsiders. Eventually, the mode failed because the cultures it produced became ever narrower, shallower, and unsatisfying.

At their best, subsocieties and subcultures were refuges from the screeching chaotic dysfunction of nation-scale systematic social institutions and the nation-scale culture war. Particularism allowed members to deny responsibility for anything outside their subculture. Most did their best to simply ignore all that and enjoyed playing in their sandbox. This made the mode parasitic: keeping civilization running was someone else’s problem. Society as a whole cannot take this attitude. Meanwhile, nation-scale social institutions often regarded subcultures as threats, and attempted to destroy them, sometimes successfully. Nation-scale economic institutions often saw subcultures as opportunities for exploitation, which also destroyed some.

The failure of the countercultures showed that universalism, as an absolute, cannot work. However, the particularism of the subcultural mode also did not work as an absolute:

  • Rejecting mass culture as inherently rubbish was a mistake
  • We need effective nation-scale social institutions
  • The attitude that subsociety membership makes you special↗︎︎ was psychologically harmful

The fluid mode must relativize both universalism and particularism:

  • Sameness and difference are not absolute; they shade into each other
  • Any two people, or two groups, are similar in some ways and dissimilar in others
  • Some principles apply almost universally; others make sense only for some people
  • Therefore, social institutions must address different issues at different scales
  • Because subsocieties are elective, many coexist in a single city. Organizing government structures geographically no longer maps social differences; we need an alternative

Supportive subsocieties were a great accomplishment of the subcultural era. I hope the fluid mode can create something similar. That will require explicitly reworking the relationship between subsocieties and larger groups. Both sides must understand and respect the needs of the other. Subsocieties must acknowledge their dependence on the effective functioning of states and economies, and must contribute to them. States and economies must acknowledge the worth of elective communities with distinctive values, and cede control over some matters to them.

This will not be easy. However, a proper understanding of the nature of boundaries may take us quite a long way. The boundaries between social groups are always both nebulous and patterned: selectively permeable. Boundaries exist only through constant maintenance activity: judgements of who and what is on one side or the other, who and what may pass, and the actions taken accordingly. Such judgements can never be fully systematized, but undergo continual renegotiation. And so boundaries naturally evolve as circumstances change.

This understanding illuminates the vertical relationship between subsocieties and larger institutions; the horizontal relationship between different subsocieties; and the relationship between individuals and subsocieties.

Embrace atomization

The atomization of culture, society, and self has liquefied experience. This mode contributes the critical realization that perfect coherence is neither necessary nor even desirable.

At a practical, intuitive, kinesthetic level, we have become much more tolerant of nebulosity: of paradox, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Accepting nebulosity is a major step toward the complete stance, and toward the fluid mode.

Abandoning coherence altogether produces an overwhelming ocean of meanings that do not relate to each other in any way. That gives an impression of pervasive triviality. Value judgements—even aesthetic ones—seem impossible when nothing hangs together. Society cannot function without coherent relationships.

And yet… we do make value judgements, and society does still function. We have developed skills for navigating the seas of meaning. Mainly without explicit understanding, we constantly re-create relative coherence. We have learned to assemble atoms of meaning into temporary sea-worthy vessels, and to let go of those as they dissolve.

We are, in other words, already in the fluid mode. As we always have been↗︎︎.

Now we just need to get good at it.

Sailing the seas of meaningness

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the fluid mode of society, culture, and self.

For a preview, see this page.

Fluid understanding: meta-rationality

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Meta-rationality means using rational systems effectively without taking them as fixed and certain. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods.

For a preview, see “What they don’t teach you at STEM school.”

Fluid self in relationship

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the implications of the fluid mode↗︎︎ for personal psychology and our conceptions of our selves and close relationships.

For an overview, see the Fluidity section of “Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence↗︎︎.”

The Cofounders

Prithi and Carlos

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Sajjad Hussain M

Meta-systematicity manifests as the forefront of all domains of meaning, including in personal psychology, rational understanding, social organization, and culture. Observing meta-systematicity across these domains reveals structural parallels, so that insight from each domain illuminates the others.

This page braids together three purposes:

  • It casts light on meta-systematicity in general by showing its dynamics specifically in self-understanding and in relationships;
  • It illustrates meta-systematicity in relationships with an example of tech startup cofounders;
  • It gives a glimpse of meta-systematic social organization through the case of technology companies; by analogy with meta-systematic relationships; and by application of the understanding of meta-systematicity in general.

The topic poses a chicken-and-egg problem. The ability to think meta-systematically is a prerequisite to learning what meta-systematicity is—just as the ability to think systematically is a prerequisite to learning what systematicity is.1 So the path from systematicity to meta-systematicity is difficult, gradual, and takes years.

A map of the way ahead helps. Learning about how one learns to be meta-systematic may be the best way to learn what it is to be meta-systematic.

I illustrate the path to personal and relational meta-systematicity with a series of snapshots of the development of a fictional character, Prithi. She is the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of an imaginary technology startup. She cofounded it with her college friend, and now co-CEO, Carlos.

Each snapshot features a monologue in which Prithi explains how she understands some problem in a fictional interpersonal situation. Each story is simple and concrete, to make understanding easier. However, it would still be easy to miss the points, which are subtle and abstract. I will ask you to listen to each monologue in a peculiar, difficult way: at three levels simultaneously. There are the events: who said what. There are the meanings Prithi ascribes to those events. And there is the way those meanings come to be, and how they interact with the events, characters, and each other. The first two levels, the events and their meanings, are simplified specifics I invented to give substance for the third, which is the topic of this page.

The third level, the dynamics of meaning, progresses from systematic to meta-systematic. In the systematic mode, meanings are structured by a collection of rules, policies, principles, and procedures that interlock as a coherent system. Systems can function extremely effectively, but are brittle in the face of nebulosity↗︎︎—uncertainty, change, ambiguity, and indefiniteness. The meta-systematic mode addresses nebulosity by expanding concern outside any system, to consider how systems relate to the unspecifiable details of reality, and to each other.

So what matters is not so much what Prithi says, as how she comes to say it. Listen for incremental shifts in how she, systems, and meanings relate to each other. This may require repeated re-readings. I will try to help: with analysis after each monologue, and in some cases by interrupting Prithi to comment on what she is saying in real time.

For understanding relationship dynamics, the story context of business leadership is just set-dressing. How Prithi thinks and feels and acts could be illustrated equally well in the context of a marriage, for example.2 (In fact, the cofounder relationship is often likened to one.) However, the operation of a business or other organization can also shift from systematic to meta-systematic. Prithi will describe this change in the final snapshot. Then I’ll say more about meta-systematic organizations in an epilogue.

This page is significantly influenced by Robert Kegan’s psychological framework↗︎︎. He describes stages of personal development over a lifetime, numbered 0 to 5. Adults may progress from the communal, pre-systematic mode↗︎︎ (stage 3), through the rational, systematic mode↗︎︎ (stage 4), to the fluid, meta-systematic mode↗︎︎ (stage 5). I’ve labeled the seven snapshots 4, 4.2, 4.4, and so on. The decimal notation is not quantitative; it’s an artificial expository device for pointing out the gradual nature of the transition.3 These steps are not sudden jumps, but arbitrary markers, spaced about a year apart, in a continuous process. By breaking the long transition down into pieces, I hope to make it, and the endpoint, seem feasible and understandable, and not inscrutable magic.

Each snapshot shows Prithi participating in more-or-less the same event. Retelling that story over and over lets you compare her reactions at different points in her development, apples-to-apples, as it were. Still, the details change as she reacts differently. Meanwhile, in the background, you can imagine her company growing from ten people to a thousand over the course of the page, and the several years of development it represents.

There may come a point, part way through this page, where it stops making sense and starts to sound abstract or implausible. If its overall trajectory seems attractive, you might consider the possibility that this point represents your own growth edge. Reflection around that step might be particularly helpful.

4. A system for relating

Yesterday the big sale Carlos was working on fell through. It was supposed to be a three-year contract with a giant multinational. They backed out at the last minute and signed with a bigger, older competitor of ours, who are “more stable,” although their products are inferior. It turns out our prospective client was sending all our confidential technical proposals to the other guys, and stringing us along to get our ideas for free. Carlos was so mad at them, and burned some bridges. But he also blamed himself for not figuring it out earlier.

We left the office right after; he told me he was going to start yelling at his staff if he didn’t get away right then. We did a long walk along the Embarcadero and then way the heck out to the Presidio. I was mostly just listening. That’s the best way to handle it when someone’s upset. Don’t try to fix things or suggest solutions or tell them they did or didn’t do the best they could. Anyway, when we founded the company, we agreed that sales was his thing. I stay out of it, except when he needs me there to explain tech stuff to a prospective customer.

He kept asking me if I’d be as angry as he was. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have been. The outcome isn’t fatal, and who would have thought such a respected company would be so flagrantly unethical? But I couldn’t tell him that, because it would have been ignoring how upset he was. And he and I are really different, although we work well together. That’s a lot of why we work well together! My explaining how I would have felt would be irrelevant to how he did feel. It would be like making him wrong for feeling that way. Or at least interfering in his work to make sense of his own emotional process. Instead I wanted to just let him know that I understood how he felt, without judging it.

Prithi’s monologue might at first sound like the pre-systematic communal mode, because it is about feelings and relationships, which are central for that mode. But stages are defined by dynamics: by how you process meanings, not by which meanings you process. Relationships and emotions are always important. The question is whether you treat them pre-systematically, systematically, or meta-systematically. So understanding what makes this monologue systematic, not communal, will bring us to the starting point of the journey from systematicity to meta-systematicity.

In the communal mode, differences in feelings, opinions, and goals are inherently a problem for a relationship. In that mode, Prithi might try to persuade Carlos that he should feel about his failure the same way she did. Or she might think she should feel about it the way he did. Or she might feel like she wasn’t being a loyal cofounder because her views weren’t aligned with his. Startup cofounders in the communal mode try to sweep conflicts under the rug, which stores up trouble for later.

Prithi worked hard to understand Carlos’ feelings, but it didn’t bother her not to feel the same way. In the communal mode, you can take another person’s point of view; but in doing so, you lose your own perspective, because feelings are supposed to be shared. Prithi maintains her own feelings at the same time she recognizes his. For the systematic mode, emotional differences are not inherently a problem, because the relationship itself is formally structured, not just a bundle of of shared feelings.

Prithi exercises her systematic theory of how emotions should be processed in relationships, which includes not interfering with Carlos’ process. It’s not that Prithi is oblivious to Carlos’ feelings, or unsympathetic. She cares about them as a matter of genuine relational concern, as well as pragmatically and ethically. However, his experience is his experience; she’s “just visiting” his way of being. According to her conceptual framework, a successful outcome of this interaction will result in better understanding, but it will leave both of their ways of feeling and relating untouched.

Prithi defines herself as a rational system, interfacing with another rational system, according to a well-defined API. We call that API “professionalism.”4 It includes understanding that people have different roles and responsibilities in an organization, and different ways of making sense of feelings, people, and work; and that we work best together by respecting and allowing those differences. Prithi understands not just that Carlos has different feelings about the deal falling through. At stage three one can recognize that. At stage four, she understands the larger picture that his conceptual structure for success and failure and business ethics, which generates the feelings, is different. She understands that he too has a stage four worldview; he generally subordinates his feelings and personal relationships to his principles and his organizational role. For example, by not taking out his frustration on his staff!5

But… she’s being a bit rigid in her professionalism, in her non-intervention, in her insistence on sticking to her specific theory of how to do the relationship when he’s asking for something different. Prithi takes herself as the author of her personal system, and so—ironically—gets unconsciously defined by it. Synchronizing feelings for the sake of relationship harmony seems like regression to stage three for her. At the level of meaning, her problem is to figure out how to maintain her policy of keeping feelings to herself in the face of his repeated request that she violate it. His request is reasonable, but at stage four it does not occur to her to question the model.

She was, therefore, responding to Carlos not as a whole person, but in terms of an abstract principle, and in terms of their formal roles in the company. What makes this stage four is not this particular principle (a meaning). It’s the dynamics. The way she’s holding the meaning, as a fixed fact (“the best way”), has limited her space of possible actions unnecessarily.

Moving on toward the fluid mode, Prithi will gain greater freedom and flexibility by relativizing roles, principles, and systematic frameworks. But at this stage of development, she cannot yet see that she might operate effectively outside her own system, because she is subject to it as an ideological commitment. She would understand “operating outside the system” as just a reversion to unprincipled communalism. If meta-systematic fluidity were explained to her, she’d misunderstand it as an incoherent attempt to compromise between systematicity and the communal mode.

4.2. A glimpse of meta-systematicity

Carlos kept asking me how I would feel if I’d screwed up like that. And I kept turning the conversation back to how he felt, because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have been nearly as upset as he was. I kept waffling and evading the question, because I didn’t want to invalidate his feelings. I thought they were reasonable, even if I would have felt differently.

But afterwards, I woke up in the middle of the night, replaying our conversation. We’ve been friends for years, and of course we sometimes disagree, but I think we’ve done a good job of resolving conflicts by asking “What’s best for the business? What evidence do we have? How do we do a cost-benefit analysis here? Whose area of responsibility does this decision lie in?” But recently I’ve started to worry he feels I’m distancing him. We’re still getting along, but are we still friends? It’s not that I’m not taking his emotions seriously; but we don’t want to get that in the way of our work.

I wonder if, in that conversation, I might have closed off an opportunity for him to learn something. I mean not that I would be teaching him, but just explaining a different way of thinking about it. Maybe my attempt to honor his way of thinking was counterproductive? Or, not the honoring, but my evasiveness… Maybe the way I decided how to respond is not optimal. But I’m not sure what I could have said that would’ve changed how he thought, or whether it could help for him to hear “no I wouldn’t feel that way.” Maybe I need to read more about interpersonal dynamics.

Or, I guess, maybe I should somehow have been feeling for some more intuitive or creative way of working with his upset? You can get lost in psychobabble woo that way, though.

In this second snapshot, Prithi recognizes that her principled, rational, systematic ideas about how relationships should work are open to question. She has some ability to imagine a meta-systematic alternative, but mostly can’t yet act on it.

At stage four, Prithi thought she had a rational theory of relationships, but in fact it had her. Because she took it as a justified, true belief, she was that system of relating, as nearly as she could manage. In the first monologue, the conflict she described was between her principles and Carlos’ repeated request. Now she experiences a conflict between her principles and her growing recognition that they are not absolute, and are open to doubt. She has begun to recognize that she is subject to a system. This is a first step toward a self larger than any ideology, with the greater freedom and power of reflecting on and using multiple systems.

If you do not share Prithi’s particular theory of relationships, you may be feeling superior now. She is being a bit stubbornly stupid. But recall that specific meanings—such as this theory—are not the point. What matters are the dynamics of how she relates to it. Holding any other principle in an absolute way would equally imply that she is operating in the systematic mode (and being a bit stubbornly stupid). This stubbornness responds to the fear that the only alternative to rigid rational principles is an irresponsible, emotional relativism: the communal mode she has left firmly behind.

Confronted with evidence that a principle is not always right, the systematic mode attempts to fix the framework; or—failing that—to replace it with some other explicit truth. (“Maybe I need to read more about interpersonal dynamics.”) The content can change, but within stage four, the way it is held remains the same. It retains an unconscious commitment to the idea that some system must be correct.

In 4.2, the possibility of reflecting on “the way I decided” arises. Prithi begins, hesitantly, to expand beyond her personal system. She begins to have some perspective on it, some recognition of how it works, which allows her to question its costs and adequacy.

On the way in to stage four, you fear that you may not always be able to conform to your system. On the way out, you become dissatisfied with its reliable bureaucratic functioning, because it’s emotionally isolating, intellectually limiting, and wearyingly familiar. You may wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how your life became so superficial, mechanical, and stale.

The first step beyond systematicity is suspicion. That begins after seeing enough systems fail, and enough irreconcilable conflicts between pairs of systems that both seem more-or-less valid. Is it possible that loyalty to any system might be a mistake?

So Prithi now wonders if she could “feel for” some other way of being. The nebulous possibility of fluidity, a new dynamics of meaningness, appears on the horizon, although she says she doesn’t know how or whether it could work. At this point, it is common to describe the imagined future way of being as “intuitive” or “creative.” This is not exactly wrong, but it expresses a sense of mere unknowing; of the possibility being too vague to describe. That can be frightening. Exiting stage four, as the personal system you identify with starts to lose its grip, it resists its loss of control. It makes progress toward five feel like regression toward stage three (“lost in psychobabble woo”).

Prithi also still understands the problem as one of how she would “work with” his upset. That is an individualist, stage four conception. Stage three tends toward emotional fusion, and stage four toward emotional self-containment. Stage five understands the self-other “boundary” as patterns of interaction that are real and necessary, but nebulous↗︎︎ and permeable. Self and other actively co-construct, and ongoingly redefine, systems of meaning, including what it means to be inside, outside, or shared. But here Prithi can only distantly sense this possibility.

4.4. Learning meta-systematic skills

Carlos asked me several times how I would feel if I’d screwed up like that—and gotten screwed like that. At first I kept turning the conversation back to why he felt what he did. But eventually I realized I was being annoying and unhelpful. So instead I told him explicitly that it seemed like explaining that would distract from what he was feeling, and from helping him understand why.

And he said “But that’s not what I want from you! I know what I’m feeling, and why. What I want to know is whether there’s some better way I could be dealing with it. Admit it, I know you wouldn’t get so angry! Why not?”

So then we had a long talk about different ways he and I react when things go wrong, and how we make sense of success and failure, and about ethics in business. In the end he said that he realized part of his upset came from having assumptions violated that are maybe excessively rigid and unrealistic. And I realized that saying what I would think or feel or do in his shoes could be helpful, even though sales isn’t my area of expertise. Just listening non-judgmentally isn’t always the right approach. So I learned something, too. I think I have a better understanding of how to deal with other people’s upset.

Also, I think it’s improved our relationship; there’s a new sense that we can take input from each other in ways that go beyond just our professional roles. Our having to interface professionally with each other, while carrying all the responsibilities in this business—which are getting intense in new ways, as it’s grown—doesn’t mean we aren’t friends. Again.

In this snapshot, Prithi opens to the possibility of co-creating the meaning of the event. By explaining her evasiveness to Carlos, and then dropping it, she allows for a revision of her theory of relationships in the light of his different understanding. These are meta-systematic dynamics: they subordinate the systematic ideology to the process of ontological remodeling. This is the qualitative, collaborative transformation of one’s self, eventually allowing its meaning to remain inseparably nebulous and patterned↗︎︎.

However, at this point Prithi takes the possibility as one of theory revision to improve a systematic self—a stage four dynamic. Stage four is all about holding true beliefs, and about methods for successful problem-solving. Stage five takes those for granted; its dynamics focus instead on ontological transformations of nebulous circumstances.

In their conversation, both Carlos and Prithi discovered bugs in the operation of their personal administrations, and installed fixes they designed in consultation. They have co-created meanings, but each will own them individually, and as new but fixed commitments. In 4.8, we’ll see meaning scintillating in their interaction, jointly owned and constantly re-forming. At 4.4, even if revisions require significant re-architecting of their personal processes, the improvements will merely return each to a state of smooth, systematic individual functioning. That is the aim of stage four self-management.

So, overall, 4.4 is defined as having developed some skill in meta-systematicity, but not deploying it consistently. Also, it understands meta-systematic operations mainly from within a stage four conceptual framework, as ways of enhancing a system. In the cognitive domain, 4.4 is excitement about learning meta-rational skills, but taking them as new ways of accomplishing the goals of rationality, such as discovering truths and evaluating principles.6 This is not wrong, but it is a limited view.

4.5. The chasm of nihilism

I kept trying to just let Carlos go on about his feelings—because what’s it matter what I do or don’t feel? People have feelings, and they don’t mean anything. You just have to get on with the job. Different people have different feelings; so what?

Anyway, I was pretty sure that talking about it would just mean unloading my negativity on him, and what good is that. But he insisted, so I decided to just give it to him straight. I’m tired of pretending.

“In the bigger picture,” I said, “you could say we all just evolved to maximize our personal advantage, so you can’t really expect people to do anything else. You could say those guys behaved ‘unethically,’ but basically that’s just a social convention. Well, of course they were doing what was best for them! We happened to be collateral damage, but that’s just the luck of the draw.

“They’re in business to make money; we’re in business to make money. We’re past the point of money meaning anything; it’s just more of the same. We could walk away from the company now and be done. Why not? What do you have to prove? If you want to keep score by counting dollars and deals, that’s fine, but you might as well be playing a video game. It’s empty. If you run your life by your sales numbers, it’s going to be an endless emotional rollercoaster, and about nothing.”

Carlos didn’t like any of that. As I expected. He went on about “ethics” and “our mission” and stuff. It’s all BS, and he must know that at some level, but he’s still pretty idealistic.

Well, we don’t think about things the same way, but it doesn’t matter. We can still work together, I guess. It’s tiresome, though.

Something appears to have gone badly wrong here.

Crossing the bridge from four to five, it is possible to fall into a gap of nihilism↗︎︎. That is called “4.5” in the developmental literature. It is probably not a necessary step, although it is quite common, particularly for tech folks.

In my cheery depictions of 4.2 and 4.4, Prithi is drawn forward by a gradually clearer view of stage five: a better way of being. At 4.5, we see how she has also been shoved forward by an increasingly clear understanding of the defects of stage four.

In the systematic mode, you must semi-consciously blind yourself to anything that contradicts the system. In a group, everyone colludes to pretend things are going as they should when they aren’t, and to hope everything will work out somehow. When you see through this, it’s nauseating and infuriating. How could all those people around me be so stupid?

Systems offer false promises of meaning. When you’ve seen those fail enough times, you resolve never to get fooled again. For instance, you recognize that corporate “mission statements” are sanctimonious kitsch, designed to dupe dullards. The lie becomes increasingly offensive, and it’s hard not to attack it.

In relationships, rigorously containing your emotions, managing the emotions of less systematic people, and carefully channeling all interactions productively—skills that were triumphant accomplishments of stage four—come to feel like endless scutwork. Holding everything together, emotionally and practically, for people who are too childish to hold themselves together becomes claustrophobic and oppressive. Part of you wants to just say what you feel, but you know precisely why that’s a bad idea.

You recognize that that all ethical systems are shams. None of them can give the absolute grounding for moral judgements that they claim. They all sometimes give awful advice. Anyway, mostly there is no right or wrong; it’s all gray areas. At 4.5, you may adopt explicit amoralism.

From 4 through 4.4, systems give definite answers to questions of meaning: you are justified, by principles, in caring about the things you do.7 Fear of losing that caring is a major reason for holding back from development, for getting stuck. That fear is realistic! At 4.5, “what is meaningful?” becomes an oppressive existential quandry, or has a definite negative answer. You may convince yourself that everything is completely meaningless: the stance↗︎︎ of nihilism↗︎︎.

Prithi sounds contemptuous of Carlos’ assertions of meaning, because at 4.5 they sound like naive idealism, which she has put firmly and permanently behind her. (The word “just” often serves to deny or minimize meaningfulness. Notice how often Prithi used it here.)

When you lose all faith in systematicity, but can see no workable replacement, you may fall into crippling dysfunction. I know people who, at this point, became completely non-functional for several years. Feeling that you have lost the capacity for confident, competent self-administration can render you practically catatonic.

Prithi has a milder case. She is still functioning as a startup CTO, although she may often feel that she’s running on empty (“you just have to get on with the job”) and her staff may now find her bitterness frightening and demotivating. She is cynical, but not (yet) despairing. In the language of Meaningness, she displays mainly materialism↗︎︎, the stance↗︎︎ which denies↗︎︎ “higher purposes” but admits “mundane” ones—“personal advantage,” as Prithi says. Sometimes she goes a step further, into Lite nihilism: the business is “past the point of meaning anything.”

4.5 is a profound change in the dynamics of meaningness, based on an ontological misunderstanding, and usually supported by extensive (although fallacious) intellectual reasoning. It is similar in feel to depression, and they often go together, but nihilism is not primarily a mood disorder. Mistaking it for generic depression can actively impede moving beyond it.

I said “something appears to have gone badly wrong.” However, there is much that is right in 4.5 nihilism. It is a genuine growth step forward from 4.4 because its recognition of the limits of systems, and the defects of systematicity, are accurate. It’s true that “missions” are usually self-aggrandizing or cynical propaganda (although genuine purpose is possible). It’s true that ethical systems are all fallacious and sometimes harmful (although accurate ethical judgement is possible).

Post-systematic Prithi does have a “bigger picture.” In the first two sentences of her lecture to Carlos, “you could say… you could say,” she points out the relevance of two ethical views, without holding out either as an absolute. She has relativized not just a particular system, but systematicity itself, so she is no longer subject to any ideology. What she cannot yet manage is to coordinate multiple ethical systems, in context, to make a wise meta-systematic judgement.

In her relationship with Carlos, she is newly brave and honest. This was probably an exceptionally bad time to start, but a new sort of intimacy has become possible. She’s finally willing to break out of her system, to expose her feelings and her way of making sense. (In 4.4, she discussed her feelings conceptually but did not allow them to break through into her way of talking.) She’s suspending her rigid self-containment for a moment, taking a risk, and “giving it to him straight.” The “tiresome” burden of pretense no longer seems worth the effort.

Post-systematic nihilism results when you finally give up on systematicity, but find nothing better to replace it with. If you have developed meta-systematic skill before letting go of systematicity, and can see the way forward, there is no need for nihilistic hostility, depression, or anxiety.

Let’s rewind to 4.4, imagine that Prithi was able to mostly skip 4.5, and head cheerily onward into 4.6.

4.6. Pulling away from systematic limits

In this snapshot, as in 4.4, Prithi displays a mixture of systematic and meta-systematic understanding. What’s different is that the overall dynamics are now fluid (although carrying significant systematic baggage), whereas 4.4 had systematic dynamics overall (although Prithi was growing significant meta-systematic skills). The balance has shifted toward fluidity.

At first I evaded Carlos’ question. My policy, at least as a default, is mostly just to listen, because when people are really upset, they need first to talk, and to feel that they are being understood. Then I can play back what they’ve said, maybe in more precise language than they’d managed, if I’m following their process accurately. That might help them see more clearly how they are thinking about it. Or they may say “no, it’s not like that,” and I’ll get a better picture myself. I don’t interfere with their process unless it looks like someone’s headed off a cliff. It’s much better for them to work through it themselves. And Carlos wasn’t heading off a cliff!

But Carlos didn’t want to talk about how angry he was; he wanted to talk about why I wouldn’t be angry. So for a couple minutes I felt kind of stuck. That’s not how this sort of conversation is supposed to go! I’m a pretty good people manager, for a techie, and I know how this works. I’m not going to let go of that so easily.

The residual fourishness in this monologue is that Prithi has a set system for addressing a particular sort of situation (“my policy”). On the other hand, she recognizes that it admits exceptions. It is only “a default,” although she “doesn’t let go of it easily.” She would like to restrict the exceptions to specified criteria (“going off a cliff”), thereby including the limits of the system within the system. But, in this case, that doesn’t make sense, which for a while leaves her feeling “stuck”—because she’s clinging to her old, systematic way of being.

But Carlos is incredibly smart in his own way, and I trust him even when he does something I don’t really understand. So I started explaining how I would have felt, and that opened out into a broad discussion about what success and failure mean.

Here she breaks free of her stuckness, and suspends her policy, operating outside any criterion. That’s fiveish.8

And about why we are even doing this! I mean, when we started, obviously we wanted to be successful, we wanted to make buckets of money, we wanted to make cool stuff, but I don’t think we had really thought that through. Now we’ve done all those things. Do we check off “found a startup” in our task management apps and move on to the next thing? “Success” means something different for us now than it did then. It’s not really clear what. Just setting the same bar higher—more customers, more employees, bigger valuation—that’s not going to be satisfying in the long run.

I’ve been struggling with this myself for the past year or so. I’ve wondered if I’ve gone as far with CTOing as I want to. I hadn’t admitted this to Carlos, but I’ve toyed with the idea of leaving the company to take on something quite different. Maybe I should start an Effective Altruism organization instead, for example. But in the end, whatever your project is, it will succeed, or fail, and you’re just back in the same place. When you don’t know what you are capable of, doing anything difficult is really exciting. But when you’re confident you can succeed at most things, you have to ask “do this? do that? do what? why do anything?”

This echoes Prithi’s nihilistic doubts at 4.5. She recognizes, rightly, that any definite positive answer to “what is meaningful?” will ultimately fail: “you’re just back in the same place.” But at 4.6, Prithi glimpses an alternative to both the positive certainty of stage 4 and the negative certainty of 4.5 nihilism. Meaningness↗︎︎ can become a permanently open question. The possibility of groundless caring begins to emerge.

However, another part of her still has the sense that finding her true purpose is a problem that could somehow, in principle, be solved. “It’s not really clear what” suggests that the issue is epistemological: there is a correct answer, a truth, but she doesn’t know it. The fluid mode recognizes the problem is ontological: purpose is real and vital, but necessarily nebulous.

So it turned out we talked as much about my feelings as about his! Carlos does think about things very differently from me, and he wound up intervening in my process at least as much as I was intervening in his. Although I think he was honestly mostly just trying to understand how I was thinking about it.

In retrospect, I wish we’d talked this through a year ago. I’d been stuck with some pretty fixed ideas about what we are doing and why, and they weren’t working anymore. The discussion has freed me up to reevaluate my role, and to talk about how my real attitude toward the company has kept changing, year after year. That was a huge relief. Admitting my doubts felt like a big risk, but it turns out he’s supportive of whatever I decide to do.

Prithi now values the reevaluation of ontological commitments more for the sake of allowing the ongoing unfolding of meaning than for any specific systemic improvement it may deliver. This is definitional for stage five.

Prithi attributes this move beyond systematicity to her trust in Carlos. It would be equally accurate to attribute it to her growing trust in her competence in navigating territory she “doesn’t really understand,” without any map to guide her. She’s excited not that she has discovered new truths, or that the interaction has improved her self-system, but that it’s that it’s freeing her from taking any system as a fixed truth.

She reflects meta-systematically on the limitations of her own mostly-transcended systematic self. Her default way of being is shifting into meta-systematic fluidity. The question of her role is no longer a problem to be solved, but an inherently open-ended process of transformation. Involving Carlos in defining the meaning of her work life is now a reality, and not just a matter of occasionally “taking input” from him. On the other hand, she still partly conceives of this as an individual process with a definite end-point. She speaks of “his process” versus “my process,” and says she will “reevaluate” her role, and “decide what to do.”

A possible misunderstanding here is that the shift from systematicity to fluidity is one from goal orientation to process orientation. In fact, you can prioritize either goals or processes (or, ideally, both) at any developmental stage. What differs is the way you relate to them.

  • If you are process-oriented at stage four, your concern is to carry out processes systematically. They should conform to your principled theory of correctness, or to proper organizational policies and procedures.

    Fixed goal formats, like the SMART criteria↗︎︎, express the essence of goal orientation for stage four. They are entirely appropriate at that stage, and particularly valuable when first moving into it. However, they can also limit serendipitous redefinition as unexpected obstacles or opportunities arise.

  • If you are goal-oriented at stage five, you recognize that what counts as achieving a goal is always somewhat nebulous. Ticking off a minor goal often involves a judgement call; declaring it complete is partly a matter of interpretation. Major goals redefine themselves, transmute and expand, as circumstances change and as you change. There can be no final accomplishment—that would just put you “back in the same place.” Success at stage five is no less important, but what “success” means becomes a permanently open question.

4.8. Mostly meta-systematic

Why wouldn’t I have been angry? For a couple minutes, I deflected Carlos’ question, saying I wanted to give him space to work things out himself. But he called me on that. When we discussed my reluctance, I realized that, although that was genuinely one motivation, I was also hiding something, partly even from myself.

As we talked it through, I had to admit that, in Carlos’ position, I really would have been angry. I could be calm about it only because I considered sales not my problem. That’s been the fundamental division of responsibility in the company from the start. “I’m in charge of tech, and I deliver.” It was often a gargantuan effort, and I thought I had to be in control of everything to make it happen. But in enterprise sales… you can’t be in control when you’re trying to make a deal with a company a hundred times larger than you. Meeting engineering targets is tough, but he’s had to deal with way more uncertainty than I have.

I knew that, but I’d always implicitly considered it his problem—because I didn’t want to deal with it. On reflection, I knew I’d often have been terrified. And, yes I’d be furious about their double-crossing us. I mean, I was furious, once I admitted that. Although it was also moderated by my taking success and failure more analytically than Carlos does.

When we began, it was just the two of us, so “CTO” was almost a joke. It just meant I wrote all the code, while he hustled for money. We both also did whatever was necessary. I did the bookkeeping and assembled the flat-pack furniture and negotiated our first office space lease. But then we hired people to do all those things. And once we had half a dozen engineers, “CTO” really meant system architect: I made the design decisions. We grew some more, and “CTO” came to mean hiring and coordinating our system architects, who understood technical issues I couldn’t keep track of anymore. That was hard, letting go of complete control of the technology! And recruiting and line management is not what I enjoy, or am especially good at. It’s really the job of a VP of engineering. So we hired one of those, and now—at last—I’m a real CTO.9

My job is to communicate an inspiring technical vision, inside and outside the company: to our staff, enterprise customers, partners, investors, the IT media, and the professional community.

And… (deep breath) that’s a sales role.

In discussion, together we realized that, although officially we are co-CEOs, I was avoiding taking full responsibility for the company’s success overall. And by doing that, I was artificially limiting my effectiveness—and maybe the company’s effectiveness.

It was comfortable to think of myself as a geek, just in charge of the tech side of the company. But that hasn’t been completely true ever, not from the beginning, and particularly not since I moved into the real CTO role. So… I’m going to rethink “co-CEO,” and take it as meaning not just that Carlos and I make the big decisions together, equally—as we always have—but that the whole company is my job. And his job. Even if we emphasize different aspects.

I’m feeling a bit of vertigo. It’s going to take some work to keep reminding myself of how it feels to expand that way; to not fall back into just being Alpha Geek. But it’s also exciting looking forward to what I’m becoming next!

Prithi increasingly lives as the dynamic space within which diverse systems operate, interact, and evolve, rather than as a single static structure of principles for action.

That dynamic space is not enclosed by her skull, nor limited to her sphere of responsibility. It is co-defined by Carlos, and to varying extents by everyone she interacts with. It includes “our staff, enterprise customers, partners, investors, the IT media, and the professional community.” This is not communal-mode merging; she’s still perfectly clear that she and Carlos are dissimilar people. (And it’s certainly not the monist↗︎︎ fantasy of “becoming one with everything.”) It’s an understanding that meaning plays out in interaction, not in her head. She has not ceded territory; she has expanded by recognizing that she contributes to, but does not need to individually own, the space.

The discovery of Prithi’s self-protective strategy was not the result of personal, psychological introspection; it was collaborative. And what she and Carlos uncovered was not primarily mental contents, but something she was doing—revealed by observing what she was not doing.

The central event in this monologue is this insight that Prithi has been hiding an internal conflict from herself. Such insights can occur at any developmental stage. Let’s look at meanings of such events, and dynamics that lead to conflicts and to regressive or insightful resolutions.

Understanding how each mode resolves conflicts of meaning may be the best way of understanding how the mode operates. Likewise, understanding how each fails to resolve conflicts may be the best way of understanding how you move to the next one.

In stage three, conflicts between desires are subordinated to the maintenance of a relationship. In stage four, conflicts between relationships are subordinated to the maintenance of a system. In stage five, conflicts between systems are subordinated to the maintenance of an open space for meanings to interact.

In stage three, you may hide an emotional conflict from yourself because it can’t be accommodated in the context of the relationships it arises in. For example, you may feel torn between loyalty to your boss, who has made an unpopular decision, and loyalty to your team, which is conspiring behind her back. Such tensions surface during the three-to-four transition. The communal mode could only resolve this by denying↗︎︎ the meaningfulness of one of the two relationships completely, leaving the underlying emotional conflict unaddressed. That would be a regression. Alternatively, the event could drive the insight that you need organizing principles to distinguish the different responsibilities you have in different sorts of relationships; how each sort is limited; and how to relate different relationships to each other. In the work context, professionalism is the system that provides that structure. Its dynamics expand from the personal relationships in a social community to include the systemic role relationships in a work group—regardless of the personalities involved.

In stage four, you may hide a role conflict from yourself because it can’t be accommodated in the context of the system it arises in. This may be a conflict between two roles (Prithi is both CTO and co-CEO) or between formal role boundaries and reality (Prithi is officially responsible only for tech, but cares about everything in the company and has had a de facto sales role). Such tensions of definition surface during the four-to-five transition. The systematic mode could only resolve this by denying one side of the conflict, by insisting that Prithi’s responsibility is limited to a single formal job description. She would have to blind herself to her competent contribution to aspects of the business that “aren’t her problem.” That would be a regression. Alternatively, the event could drive the insight that systems are always artificially limited, and she needs meta-systematic skills to relate systems to each other and to reality. Snapshot 5 and the Epilogue will show how that works in startup leadership.

In both transitions, you need many small, concrete insights before you get the hang of the pattern and move to the next stage. That’s why it takes years.10

At 4.8, Prithi is most of the way there, and so resolves this conflict meta-systematically fairly easily. What she and Carlos uncover is her pattern of protecting herself from fear of nebulosity (the amorphous uncertainty of enterprise sales) by applying a limited, formal self-definition. As that self-system reaches its limit and breaks down, she lets go of the temptation to cling, and instead takes it as an opportunity for expanding her view.

Prithi now understands herself as having multiple self-systems, all valid. So there is the Prithi who protected herself by limiting her responsibility to what she could control—which is totally valid. When she recognizes it, Prithi does not chastise or abandon that part of herself. She just will no longer be ruled by that definition—or any other. There is programmer-Prithi, who thinks the most important thing is to get the technical decisions right. And that’s true! And there’s engineering-manager-Prithi, who thinks the most important thing is to make sure the development team operates effectively. And that’s true! And there’s CTO-Prithi, who thinks the most important thing is to create and communicate a vision of the future—and that’s true! So long as she is open to all these possibilities, no conflict is necessary. Meta-systematicity encourages respect among systems, even when they contradict irresolvably.

However, Prithi here is not yet quite at stage five. There’s still a trace of over-emphasis on an individual viewpoint: “what I’m becoming next.” At stage five, the space of meaning is not personal. Here at 4.8, holding that space open is still challenging (“a bit of vertigo”; “will take some work”).

In a context in which one of her systematic selves is expert, it will naturally try to take control, and she will need to remind herself not to identify with it, even temporarily. Meta-systematicity goes beyond knowing you are several selves you can switch between. Fluidity does not attempt to construct a meta-system for choosing what system to apply when. Nor is any system either alien (unambiguously outside) or a possession (unambiguously inside).

5. A deliberately developmental organization

Carlos and Prithi

Some years older and wiser
Image courtesy↗︎︎ rawpixel

Yesterday the strategic partnership arrangement we’d been working on fell through. All along, they were intending to do a deal with another company, and were pretending to negotiate a partnership as a way of getting a deeper look into our technology development roadmap.

We took our usual long walk out to the Presidio, to decompress and talk it over. We were thoroughly annoyed, which we thought was funny. After all these years, we still get ticked off when someone pulls this sort of nonsense? It’s also funny that Carlos still takes it more obviously emotionally, whereas I at least pretend to be detached and analytical in my anger. Hot and cold.

Apparent interpersonal conflict may be as intense at stage five as at any other. However, it occurs within the fluid open space where meanings interact—just as conflicts between one’s own selves do. Stage five identifies with the space, not with one’s personality or chosen principles. That doesn’t negate personal differences (“hot and cold”), nor partiality, nor principles, nor strong emotions. It does give freedom to watch conflicting meanings interact across the boundaries of persons, organizations, or tribes, without an automatic compulsion to defend some particular one. Sometimes one can learn even from people who are being hostile or unethical.

Recognizing contradictions without needing to resolve them can be entertainingly absurd. Prithi’s amusement at her own pretense in hiding her anger, and Carlos and Prithi laughing at themselves in conflict with others, is a sign of their being meta to their own self-systems. Their combination of anger and humor also shows their being larger than identifying with their own company. That wouldn’t, for instance, stop them taking the other company to court if warranted, though.

Nowadays we’re mostly annoyed with the default culture of business that says selfish game-playing is normal and acceptable—more than being mad at specific people or companies. But we’ve realized selfishness is an intrinsic aspect↗︎︎ of being human. You can’t remove it; and anyway, it’s not inherently bad. Wanting more is part of why we work and create, as well as motivating harmful or ethically sketchy behavior.11 So we try to work out structures that minimize its negative consequences. Nothing works perfectly, but active measures have helped. We’ve had to come up with new approaches every couple years, as the company has grown.

This final snapshot shifts the focus from Prithi’s relationship with Carlos to their joint facilitation of effective relationships among others. That is, from personal to organizational psychology. Prithi and Carlos are becoming the creative, reflective space within which others evolve.

Each major expansion has meant we had to put in place qualitatively different organizational modes. It’s not just formal structures; the way everyone relates to each other has to change, too. That’s been difficult, for us and everyone.

The company’s gotten big enough that Carlos and I can’t know what’s actually going on inside. We still try, but mostly we rely on our group leaders. And the natural tendency in their position is to try to grab and hold territory, to expand their division, so they look important. Then you get departments working against each other, which is how big companies get slow and stupid and full of politics that makes everyone miserable.

So we try to redirect that drive, guiding our leaders away from empire-building. We reward them for letting go of definitions, for seeing bigger pictures, not for gaining territory.

When I realized that CTOing is partly a sales role, I had to do that myself; to rethink what I am. I took several sales training courses—and got Carlos to coach me, too. That probably made me a better CTO, but it also changed the way I feel about and relate to people in general. Sales, for us, is about creating genuine connections, not tricking people into buying things they don’t need. Skill in connecting is helpful outside work too.

Prithi has come to take her own fluidity for granted. It is a reliable fact that, in the face of difficulties, she will act out of a realm of unspecifiable possibility, not ruled by any systematic theory of business management.

When you manage a business whose details you can’t know, the temptation is to think of it as a big machine, or a manufacturing plant. Then you try to optimize output by moving boxes around in the org chart, and your actions are all “move 27 engineers from department A to department B,” even though you have no idea what they do. They are engineers, right? and the spreadsheet says we need to increase output in B. You think people are their job descriptions. Like machines on the factory floor that have defined inputs and outputs. Then they’re forced to pretend to be their job descriptions, and that’s a disaster.

A system of formal responsibilities is a critically important tool as you go from a hundred people to a thousand; but you also have to realize it’s just a representation. An org chart is not reality, and you don’t change reality by changing the representation. You have to keep asking “how does this representation relate to the nuts-and-bolts reality of how these particular people work together?”

Prithi here expresses a core concern of meta-rationality, which understands relationships between representations and reality not as truths but as tools. This is meta-systematicity in its cognitive manifestation.12

We can’t afford to have anyone limited by a job description. Like, when we started, I didn’t know how to negotiate an office lease, but it had to be done, so I read some stuff and then just plunged in. Realistically, nobody can do everything. When being a regional comptroller, you need to know the GAAP rules for amortizing development costs, and when being a front-end developer, you need to know the Javascript rules for type coercion. But in principle you should be willing to learn either or both, if you had to. Beyond that, there’s learning to think like an accountant or a programmer. Or, more realistically: for an accountant to think like a facilities manager or market strategist; and for a programmer to think like a product manager or UX designer.

So we aim to develop and reward “fluid competence,” more than excellence↗︎︎ in a specific role. We encourage an attitude of “OK, this needs to be done, I can probably do it”—combined with wanting to actually figure out how to do it, not faking it or going through the motions or trying to stay safe by doing it by the book. And not covering up when you screw up! We praise and reward people for screwing up on hard things, if they are open about it.

Learning technical skills in very different fields is one of the best strategies for developing meta-systematicity—if you recognize that they imply different ways of thinking and feeling and acting, not just different lists of formal rules to master.

Last year, we introduced ongoing, mandatory interpersonal skills training for all employees. We hoped it would particularly help our more technical people broaden their competence. I knew a lot of the engineers would hate the idea. Some said the company was turning into a cult, and we lost a few of our best people. It was a calculated risk. Most stayed, and some say the training has radically improved their lives—outside work as well in it. Others resent it. Qualitatively, it seems to be a big plus overall. It probably shows up in our numbers too, but it’s not like we could have a control group. Maybe we’d be doing even better without it.

Our approach isn’t The Right Way. It’s one way, which is working, so far. It’s given us a unique reputation in the industry. We can’t be “a great place to work” for everyone. Many people prefer an environment where they can get on with doing the job they were hired for, which they know they can do well. I totally get that! My job often terrifies me. It would be way more comfortable to write code all day, or even to be a conventional CEO. But the unfolding world keeps enticing me into the unknown. “OK, this looks like the next thing, let’s figure out how to do it.”

Just as Prithi’s specific theory of relationships at stage four was not definitional of stage four, her specific approach to management here is not definitional of stage five. As she says, interpersonal training and rewarding broad competence are not The Right Way. What is fiveish is the attitude of reasoned experimental curiosity, not aiming for any final conclusion or achievement, but for ongoing responsive fluidity.

In 4.6, Prithi showed a wistful longing for some ultimate principle that would let her decide what to do—whether to leave the company for another project—even as she recognized that no such principle can exist. Here she’s left that behind without a trace. Purpose is an unrolling dynamic, a collaborative improvisational dance of self and world, continually revealing new openings and obstacles and their meanings. Stage five means letting go of eternalistic↗︎︎ promises of certainty, understanding, and control, in favor of appreciating the inseparability↗︎︎ of nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎.

Looking back over our past decade, the most striking thing is not how Carlos and I have grown the business, but how the business has kept growing us. We still have the capacity to surprise each other.

Epilogue

The story of Prithi and Carlos is about meta-systematicity in a two-person relationship. However, situating that relationship in organizational leadership allows me to switch topics here.

Meta-systematicity in organizations

Management theory is the domain where meta-systematicity is most widely appreciated, discussed, and understood. I plan to write about this in the “Fluid society” chapter of Sailing the Seas of Meaningness. That chapter will not be ready for some time, so I’ll make some preliminary observations here now, out of place.

Entrepreneurship is inherently meta-systematic.13 Entrepreneurs create companies, which are new systems. Especially in the tech industry, the products and services they provide are often also novel systems. Rapid growth requires constant reorganization. System transformation is the essence of fluidity, and usually the basis for successful entrepreneurship. (Although innovating by rote formula, like “Uber, but for X↗︎︎,” is much easier, and you may get lucky with it.)

It’s a commonplace now that all organizations operate in volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous↗︎︎ (VUCA) circumstances. “VUCA” is business-ese for nebulosity↗︎︎, which the systematic mode attempts to deny↗︎︎ or control out of existence. There’s widespread understanding that this is impossible, and that meta-systematic approaches are a better alternative. There is no solid ground; it’s a whitewater world↗︎︎, so organizations have to be fluid too.

A simplified history of the evolution of management practice may help understand this.

Traditional theories assumed workers were pre-systematic. The job of management was to provide a systematic framework within which employees worked, prototypically in manufacturing. The company as a whole could operate systematically, despite the pre-systematicity of most employees. (We could call this the “three in four” model.) Systematic executives could then optimize operations using rational, often mathematical, methods.

As postindustrial economies shifted to “knowledge work,” management practice recognized that individual employees may work systematically, and so can and must be given much greater autonomy to exercise their specialized expertise. At first this left the company’s structure unchanged: systematic employees worked in a systematic framework optimized by systematic executives. (“Four in four.”) They were understood as having specific technical, professional skills, which amount to the ability to act in accord with a particular rational system (such as GAAP or Javascript).

But as VUCA intensified, companies that had dominated their industries with relentless rational optimization and technical excellence suddenly failed when market conditions changed out from under them. Their systematic approach used fixed analysis methods that became irrelevant or inappropriate in the changing environment. Some companies are still stuck in this “zombie era” of management.14

Leaders had to learn to rethink their systems increasingly often. “Adapting to changing market conditions” means not just introducing new products or entering new markets or changing market position. It means rethinking the fundamental mindset of the company, because otherwise you find yourself weighed down by “how we do things” and unable to react.

This culminates in meta-systematic fluidity: continuous ontological remodeling. This is now almost conventional wisdom, and considered best practice, in dynamic industries such as tech.15 Meta-systematic management is widely admired in theory, but putting it in practice is difficult, and not so common even in tech. It demands meta-systematicity in senior executives.

Even then, the assumption commonly remains that most employees can only function systematically. That means that the company’s overall operation is still systematic at any moment in time, albeit with leaders injecting frequent doses of structural change. (“Four in five.”)16

Some now recognize that executives alone cannot provide sufficient fluidity. They can’t have sufficiently intimate knowledge of the details of their employees’ work—which may be even more subject to VUCA than the company overall. Just as a previous generation had to learn to trust workers to function systematically without detailed supervision, managers now need to learn to trust workers to function meta-systematically. That is, management needs to delegate continuous reformation of parts of the company to the employees who understand that part. (“Five in five.”)

This might sound “nice” and democratic to workers, or terrifying for managers, but increasingly it’s just necessary. No one knows how to structure organizations in the whitewater world; there are no longer any standard principles that work reliably. You cannot see the world clearly through the lens of a system—any system. Effective organizational functioning has to be a collaborative improvisational dance with the environment, figuring it out together as you go along.

You can’t afford not to involve as many of your people as possible in that effort. Ideally, every employee should contribute to the continual redefinition what the company is and how it functions. Realistically, most can’t do that today. The capacity must be developed. Especially, systematic employees must develop meta-systematic competence, so they can go beyond formal professional expertise to respond rapidly and accurately to emerging business conditions, exercising judgement that goes beyond any set criteria.

Because meta-systematicity is rare, takes years to develop, and is not taught in school, companies have to train it in-house.17 This makes for what Robert Kegan and his collaborators call a deliberately developmental organization.18

This requires huge management effort, but appears to have correspondingly huge financial as well as human payoffs—in Kegan et al.’s case studies at least. The deliberately developmental approach is not easily put into practice, but there’s a growing enthusiasm for it and increasing bodies of theory and practical resources.19

This understanding naturally extends to the concept of a deliberately developmental society, in which a nation-scale culture explicitly recognizes the value of adult development, not just teaching specific facts and narrow skills. In 2019, critical political, educational, and economic systems are visibly crumbling. It’s urgent to bring more of the population to systematicity; and bringing some others to meta-systematicity is critical to enabling that.

The development of the cofounder relationship

Some venture capitalists say that startup success depends more on the cofounder relationship than any other factor. It can be their main reason for choosing to invest, or not, in a founding team. Conflicts between cofounders may be the most common reason for startup failure.20 So, many resources aim to help strengthen these relationships: blog posts, podcasts, coaching, and bootcamps.

Tech startup founders are invariably cognitively systematic, from their education and early-career work in either STEM or business. However, many may not have developed to systematicity in their emotional lives and relationships. Most cofounder relationship advice I’ve found is about moving from being driven by emotions and personal relationships (stage three) to professionalism (four):

  • Don’t let conflicts or resentments fester.
  • Fight fair; disagree constructively.
  • Respect each others’ strengths and give space for each others’ emotional needs.
  • Make sure everyone’s concerns are taken into account.
  • Negotiate explicitly about who has responsibility for which decisions.
  • Let go of your ego and don’t insist on proving you are right all the time.

This is probably exactly what many straight-out-of-school founders need. It’s too basic for someone who’s gained some maturity from several years work experience, perhaps in a team leadership role.

Putting coherent organizational systems in place is the main job of scaling a startup from tens of people to hundreds. This page starts from the prerequisite, stage four. That is already more mature than many startup founders. When investors say “it’s time to bring in professional management” or “adult supervision,” the point may be to force a professional, systematic mode of relationship on the executive team. Or, to bring in technical expertise in building systematic administration, which the founders lack. Much of the work in this scale-up phase can be done by applying off-the-shelf systematic patterns. You do need↗︎︎ org charts.

But system-building won’t cut it for more than a few years in a VUCA environment. A medium-sized systematic company is a duckling sitting in open water, soon to be devoured by piranhas (smaller, faster competitors) or a hippopotamus (a much larger one). You had better grow your meta-systematic wing feathers fast.

Some consultants and coaches offer meta-systematicity training. They seem to market their services only to senior executives in larger companies. There’s not much information available on the web, and there seems to be little awareness in the startup community. I hope that will change soon. Since entrepreneurship is inherently meta-systematic, earlier training in personal and organizational fluidity should be valuable. And as more companies adopt the “five in five” model, it will be increasingly necessary throughout the organization.

What did I just read??

I mean, what even was this stuff? And where did it come from?

If you find this page interesting, I would suggest considering what parts of it are believable or useful and why. You may have to proceed meta-systematically…

I have no relevant academic credentials. And, while I have started, grown, and sold a small, successful tech company, I was a solo founder. What I’ve said about business is mostly not based on personal experience.

My understanding draws on many fields; developmental psychology was the biggest influence on this page.21 Kegan’s is one of several broadly similar theories of “postformal operations.”22 These theories inspire me not because they are well-grounded as science, but because they make sense of my experience, and what I know anecdotally about exceptional prowess in technical research and in organizational leadership. Some experimental work has been done to test postformal theories. I’m not necessarily qualified to judge this research, and I haven’t investigated it in depth, but I haven’t found the studies scientifically persuasive. (Particularly in view of the current replication crisis↗︎︎ in psychology.) I write about Kegan’s version because it’s simple and fits my anecdata, not because it has the best experimental support.23

So. You will have to figure out for yourself how to evaluate what you have just read. What considerations would be relevant? What would it even mean for it to be accurate or useful?

Such investigation is the essence of meta-systematicity—because there are no predetermined criteria or methods, and no preexisting problem definition or conceptual framework to decide how to think about it. If you choose to proceed, you will ask how my story relates to reality, and to other conceptual systems you know—crossing a chasm of nebulosity without a net.

Future directions

Although this is possibly the most detailed and practical explanation yet given of the path to meta-systematicity, it still seems unhelpfully brief and abstract. To make it more concrete, I have begun writing a “fluidity workbook” full of exercises. If I had a spare six months, it would also be fun to expand this page into a business novel. My inspiration is Eliyahu Goldratt’s cult bestseller The Goal↗︎︎. The book would take Prithi, Carlos, and their company from stages three through five, illustrating each step with a new business situation that would plausibly prompt the next form of development.

Although I’m deeply interested in meta-systematic leadership, I may be more obviously qualified to teach meta-systematicity to individual technical contributors. I wrote a preliminary curriculum sketch, “What they don’t teach you at STEM school,” a couple years ago. I am currently writing an introductory textbook, In the Cells of the Eggplant.

Thanks

I am grateful to Gary Basin↗︎︎, Sarah Constantin↗︎︎, Zach Obront↗︎︎, Malcolm Ocean↗︎︎, Rin’dzin Pamo↗︎︎, Taylor Pearson↗︎︎, Venkatesh Rao↗︎︎, Graham Rowe↗︎︎, and Anand Vemuri↗︎︎ for their suggestions on draft versions, which led to extensive revision and improvement. Of course, they may disagree with some or all of this, and aren’t at fault for whatever’s wrong with it.

  • 1. Imagine explaining your doubts to a holistic crystal healer. “There’s no good evidence this works. It seems highly improbable, given everything we know about crystals and healing. Several of your claims are clearly factually false. When you say you rely on ‘holistic intuition,’ you just mean you are making it up as you go along; you have no specific method.” If the healer has not yet learned to think rationally—systematically—they can only hear this as a string of insults, or delusional assertions of your personal or tribal superiority. Words like “evidence,” “probability,” “knowledge,” “truth,” and “method” do not mean the same thing to them as they do to you. These terms function only within a web of systematic understanding of what systematic understanding is. This chicken-and-egg difficulty is part of the reason only a minority↗︎︎ can think, feel, or act systematically. Analogously, a systematic thinker can only hear an explanation of the limits of systematicity and the advantages of meta-systematicity as delusional assertions of the superiority of inscrutable nonsense. This incomprehension is one reason so few can think meta-systematically.
  • 2. In writing this page, I’ve drawn on a discussion of the development of a marital relationship from systematicity to meta-systematicity in A Guide to the Subject-Object Interview↗︎︎, by Robert Kegan and his collaborators, who I’ll discuss repeatedly in this page. I’ve re-staged it: in order to re-present the material without violating copyright; because the tech industry context may be more interesting to my readers; and as an interesting exercise for me personally. The Guide is a technical manual; see below for better starting points for learning about the theory.
  • 3. There are other similar theories of adult development with different numbers of stages. I’ve adopted Kegan’s numbering somewhat arbitrarily. Details of his theory are open to doubt (as I discuss briefly below). However, this page does not depend on most aspects of the framework. It relies only on the conceptual distinction between systematicity and meta-systematicity, which many other thinkers have pointed out, in varying terms. For more on his framework, see my “Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence↗︎︎,” or his The Evolving Self↗︎︎.
  • 4. An API (application programming interface) is a formal definition for how a program can work together with another one. The value of an API is that the separate developers of the two programs can coordinate without needing to know anything about how the other program works, or how the other development team works. Also, a program can work together with any other program that uses the same API; it doesn’t matter which. Professionalism is a set of standards of behavior that aim to save you from having to understand all the details of your co-workers’ personal and emotional lives. You can relate to people in terms of their formal roles, rather than their personality quirks and transient upsets. That is: systematically, rather than communally. In practice professionalism can never be fully achieved, nor should it be, but as a default it is efficient and reduces interpersonal stress—for those capable of it.
  • 5. If Prithi were subordinate to Carlos, it would be highly unprofessional for him to insist on her giving an evaluation of his screw-up. But they are co-CEOs: a risky and unusual arrangement that can nevertheless work well, because it gives the CEO someone to talk to as an equal. Carlos was also unprofessional in “burning bridges” with a potential client. That’s part of what made this a screw-up. Everyone screws up sometimes; professionalism is a commitment, not an app you can just install and let run.
  • 6. Misunderstanding meta-rationality as an extension of rationality prompts the demand “just show us how these meta-rational methods work, if they are so great!” The assumption is that meta-rationality must be just a specialized class of rational methods, which might be excitingly different from other ones, like encountering a new branch of mathematics or a new programming paradigm. If they are of value, they must have the same purpose as other rational methods, and will be incorporated in and subordinated to rationality. At 4.4, one may have genuinely learned to think in a new way, while still regarding it as a specialized type of expert theory-revision and problem-solving within a comfortably rationalist framework.
  • 7. This is “eternalism↗︎︎,” in the language of Meaningness. Nihilism simply inverts eternalism. The opposite of a wrong idea is usually also a wrong idea, although it may be a necessary step toward a better idea.
  • 8. It’s not threeish, because she’s not abandoning her principled theory in favor of emotional sharing or relationship maintenance. It’s usually a good theory, and she may often act with reference to it—but she will no longer be governed by its rules, even when she’s acting in accord with it.
  • 9. The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change↗︎︎ is a practical manual for the series of personal and organizational transformations from startup tech lead to CTO, by Camille Fournier, who has lived them.
  • 10. I have described this years-long path of self-transformation, progressing through repeated insights into limiting self-definitions and hidden conflicts, in a very different style elsewhere, as “shadow eating↗︎︎.”
  • 11. Fluid operation above and around systems is very different from communal-mode operation without a system. Fluidity fully recognizes and incorporates the effective functioning of systems, which the communal mode is blind to. A possible misunderstanding is that fluidity is amoral because it holds no absolute ethical principles. Since conflicts between fundamental principles are sometimes unavoidable, none can be absolute. However, fluid ethics hold principles in high regard, and may deploy them more effectively than systematic ethics, because fluidity has additional resources for resolving dilemmas.
  • 12. See also Venkatesh Rao’s “The Amazing, Shrinking Org Chart↗︎︎,” on fluid corporations.
  • 13. This goes double for venture capital. Startup founders have only to find a way to create a successful company, mostly through one-off improvisations. Venture capitalists have to understand general patterns of business success. It is tempting to rely on systematic rationality (metrics, criteria, theories) when evaluating startup investment opportunities. That’s what you learn in business school, but mostly it doesn’t work. The best investors seem to deploy meta-rationality instead.
  • 14. Thanks to Venkatesh Rao for this term.
  • 15. Some early theorists of meta-systematic management include John Seely Brown↗︎︎ (the visionary leader of Xerox PARC), Chris Argyris↗︎︎ (who worked with Donald Schön), and Bill Torbert↗︎︎ (who worked with Robert Kegan).
  • 16. These models are necessarily simplified abstractions. Any real organization will include people at all stages of development, and different sub-organizations will operate somewhat differently. And, developmental “stages” are themselves simplified abstractions, which are heuristically useful categories but not ultimately true as ontology.
  • 17. Ben Horowitz makes an inspiring case for in-house training, led by senior managers, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers↗︎︎.
  • 18. An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization↗︎︎. Schools increasingly fail↗︎︎ to teach systematicity, so companies have to do that too. The book describes a developmental pipeline, implemented by a property management company, from pre-communal stage-two teenagers through to stage-five meta-systematicity. One advantage of training meta-systematicity in-house is that senior executives may be less panicked about delegating transformational authority if they’ve been intimately involved in training the necessary skills.
  • 19. There is also a danger of turning meta-systematicity and/or the developmental approach into a management fad, replete with buzzphrase cliches, hype ungrounded in evidence, and superficial implementations that predictably fail.
  • 20. A widely-quoted statistic is that 65% of startups fail as a result of cofounder conflict. I traced this back through the citation chain, and it’s erroneous. The original study sent a paper survey to venture capitalists in 1984 asking them how they related to their portfolio companies. (Michael Gorman and William A. Sahlman, “What do venture capitalists do?↗︎︎,” Journal of Business Venturing, 4:4 (July 1989), pp. 231-248.) The VCs cited “ineffective senior management” as the most important factor in 65% of troubled or failing companies. Since it is the responsibility of senior management to fix things, this is almost tautological, and the number in some sense should be 100%. In any case, the study says nothing about founders (as opposed to senior management in general), and nothing about interpersonal conflict (just “ineffectiveness”). Anecdotally, however, cofounder conflict is indeed a common way for startups to fail.
  • 21. For those interested in business applications, Kegan et al.’s An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization↗︎︎ is the most recent publication. Also see Garrett McAuliffe’s “The Evolution of Professional Competence,” which reviews and synthesizes research on fluid management by Kegan, Schön, Torbert, and others. (Chapter 21 in Hoare’s Handbook of Adult Development and Learning↗︎︎.) For more general discussion of Kegan’s framework, I recommend The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development↗︎︎ and In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life↗︎︎, which I have summarized elsewhere↗︎︎.
  • 22. For reviews, see Eeva Kallio’s “Integrative thinking is the key: An evaluation of current research into the development of thinking in adults↗︎︎,” Theory & Psychology, 21:6, pp. 785-801; or, in more depth, chapters 8-12 in Demick and Andreoletti’s Handbook of Adult Development↗︎︎. My thanks to Matthew Mezey for suggesting the latter.
  • 23. Although I am inspired by the work of Kegan and his collaborators, I have no affiliation with them, and what I say may not present their ideas accurately. Conversely, I have reservations about some aspects of their work, and do not necessarily endorse everything they say.

Fluid society

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the social implications of the fluid mode↗︎︎.

For a preview, see “Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness.”

Fluid culture: metamodernism

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will introduce the cultural implications of the fluid mode↗︎︎.

For a preview, see "Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness."

For introductions to metamodernism, see Philip Damico's "Introduction↗︎︎" and Seth Abramson's "What Is Metamodernism?↗︎︎" and "Metamodernism: The Basics↗︎︎."

Hanzi Freinacht1 has developed metamodernism beyond culture narrowly, into a general conception including cognition, personal psychology, and social organization. He draws on many of the same sources I do, and points in many of the same directions. His web site is Metamoderna↗︎︎. Tom Amarque has produced a fine podcast interview↗︎︎ with him; if you are familiar with my work, you'll find many of the same themes raised.

Naturally, I differ with each of these thinkers on some points.

  • 1. "Hanzi Freinacht" is a pseudonym for a team of two people, apparently.

In the Cells of the Eggplant

Eggplant in refrigerator

In the Cells of the Eggplant is an introduction to meta-rationality↗︎︎: ways of using rational↗︎︎ systems more effectively by examining their relationships with their surrounds.

Meta-rationality operates in the territory beyond the boundaries of fixed↗︎︎ understanding. It recognizes, works with, and transcends the limits of rationality. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods.

As of mid-2020, only the first two Parts of The Eggplant, out of five, are complete. I have posted them here on the web.

The book gradually builds a complex, densely connected conceptual structure. It is not well-suited to reading in pieces. I recommend starting at the beginning and reading forward in order.

Parts One and Two stand alone, without the rest of the book, fairly well. However, they are on different topics, and included in The Eggplant only to provide necessary conceptual background. Part One explains why rationalism↗︎︎ is an inadequate theory of rationality↗︎︎ (so we need a better one, which Part Three offers). Part Two explains “mere reasonableness↗︎︎,” the way we go about everyday tasks like making breakfast. Part Three’s explanation of rationality relies on that.

Eventually I will publish The Eggplant in paperback and as a Kindle ebook. But I prefer reading on the web, myself! Maybe most people do! And it’s free!

Meta-rationality: An introduction

Learning to wield an invisible power

In fields requiring systematic, rational competence—science, engineering, business—some few people can do what may seem like magic.

They step into messy, complex, volatile situations and somehow transform them into routine, manageable problems. Textbook methods that were failing to come to grips with anomalies start working again.

Often these magicians have less relevant factual and conceptual knowledge than others who found the situation impossible. They may have no special skill in applying technical methods. Instead they may:

  • Notice relevant factors that others overlooked
  • Point out non-obvious gaps or friction between theory and reality
  • Ask key questions no one had thought of
  • Make new distinctions that suggest different conceptualizations of the situation
  • Change the description of the problem so that different solution approaches appear
  • Rethink the purpose of the work, and therefore technical priorities
  • Realize that difficulties others struggled with can simply be ignored, or demoted in importance
  • Apply concepts or methods from seemingly distant fields
  • Combine multiple contradictory views, not as a synthesis, but as a productive patchwork.

They produce these insights by investigating the relationship between a system of technical rationality and its context. The context includes a specific situation in which rationality is applied, the purposes for which it is used, the social dynamics of its use, and other rational systems that might also be brought to bear. This work operates not within a system of technical rationality, but around, above, and then on the system.

This is meta-rationality. This book is about that.

Meta-rationality is a craft, not a systematic discipline. It is not taught in the university STEM curriculum, although it is vital for technical progress. Currently, it must be learned through apprenticeship and experience. This book is the first practical introduction.

Meta-rationality is rarer than rationality, and has more leverage, but it is so rarely recognized that I had to invent the word for it. It is an invisible power.

It’s sometimes acknowledged that senior professionals with years on the job can somehow deal effectively with problems that junior technical hotshots can’t. They “have a feel for things” that finds shortcuts through difficulties, devises better approaches in ways that can’t be explained at the time, and makes projects run smoothly. This value may be acknowledged in individuals, but its source is not named or inquired into.

A meta-rational insight may seem exciting, magic, an incomprehensible breakthrough, for those restricted to a rational framework. “Wow, how did they do it? How could I learn to cut through problems like that?” Alternatively, since the results are retrospectively understandable within a rational system, the insight may be attributed to luck, or to inscrutable “intuition,” and so overlooked. Competent technical rationality has considerable prestige; competent meta-rationality has none, despite its extreme value, because there has been no word for it.

Is The Eggplant for you?

This book aims to help you level up from systematic rationality to meta-rational competence. I wrote it for people with strong technical backgrounds; it uses mainly science and engineering examples. However, no specific knowledge is a prerequisite. Expertise in another discipline of rationality—organizational management for example—might do. All the same material could be treated using transformational business case studies; and indeed we will also look at a few of those.

Because meta-rationality operates on rational systems, mastery of at least one such system is a prerequisite. Because it selects among systems, or combines several, understanding the distinctive rationalities of multiple fields—ideally several quite different ones—is a plus.

Beyond that, meta-rationality is particularly useful when rationality isn’t working well. Its value comes into view when you have seen rational systems fail enough times that you start to notice patterns of limitations to their use in practice. You realize that solving technical problems within a fixed set of concepts and methods is not always adequate. You become increasingly curious about why, and what to do about it.

You may find this book exciting if:

  • Sometimes you’ve applied textbook rational methods, and they didn’t work, due to factors they didn’t consider; but you figured out why, and devised workarounds
  • You’ve worked on a team project whose rationally-constructed plan seemed initially sensible, but increasingly dubious as unanticipated obstacles came into view; and eventually delusional; and the team kept pursuing it anyway, leading to failure
  • The technical problem-solving work that you used to enjoy for the sense of flow, of smooth confident competence, has come to seem a bit dull
  • Instead, you are increasingly interested in the preliminaries, in figuring out what a problem is
  • Your whole scientific or engineering field has stagnated; methods that used to be productive no longer generate much progress—or turn out to have been unreliable all along.

Meta-rationality also becomes increasingly important as you move from being an individual contributor into leadership, management, or entrepreneurial roles. Solving well-defined problems using standard techniques no longer cuts it. Your job is to make sense of messes in which even the problem—never mind the solution—is obscure. Done well, technical leadership is an inherently meta-rational activity: it is about selecting, modifying, and creating systems. Entrepreneurship is even more obviously meta-rational: you create an organization out of nothing, with no rules to guide you, only a nebulous↗︎︎ understanding of an opportunity.

Meta-rationality is not attractive for everyone. People differ in cognitive style, personality, and preferences. Some continue to enjoy working inside a rational system indefinitely. If that is you, you may not find this book relevant. Nevertheless, I commend you! The ability to think and act using systematic rationality is precious, and far too rare. I worry that it is waning, due to current cultural dysfunction. Wielding rationality, and defending it against irrationalism, is urgent and important. You are keeping the world running, for everyone else, in the face of mass idiocy, hysterical delusion, and tribal selfishness. Please continue!

Rationality and refrigerators

Eggplant in refrigerator

A: Is there any water in the refrigerator?
B: Yes.
A: Where? I don’t see it.
B: In the cells of the eggplant.1

Was “there is water in the refrigerator” true?

We can use systematic rationality↗︎︎ more effectively—in science, engineering, management, and policy—by investigating this question, and the problems and opportunities that exploration reveals.

What do “truth” and “belief” mean? That sounds like a typical ivory-tower philosophical puzzle. Most such questions can’t be answered, and “correct” answers, if they existed, wouldn’t make any practical difference. However, wrong ideas about “truth” and “belief” have large practical consequences, so getting a better understanding is important.

In practical terms, the meanings of “truth” and “belief” seem obvious enough. The sentence “HIV causes AIDS” is true because its meaning corresponds to reality: HIV does cause AIDS. Believing it means that you think the world is that way.

Rationalists may describe rationalism↗︎︎ as a commitment to trying to believe only true statements. Irrationalists and anti-rationalists dismiss truth: either because true facts contradict their ideological agendas, or out of plain ignorance. Meta-rationalism↗︎︎ defends “truth” against irrationalists, but rejects “truth” as misunderstood by rationalists.

Believing true things matters. “HIV causes AIDS” is true, and figuring that out saved tens of millions of lives. Some politicians, religious leaders, and “alternative medicine” advocates said they “didn’t believe” HIV causes AIDS. On that basis, they blocked HIV prevention and treatment↗︎︎, causing hundreds of thousands of horrible, unnecessary deaths.

Near the end of this book, we’ll find that the sense in which “HIV causes AIDS” is true is more complex, strange, mysterious, interesting, and consequential than you’d probably think. I’ll explain the relevant biology in detail—and I suspect you will be surprised! There are practical public health consequences to the unexpected sense in which “HIV causes AIDS” is true.

So… was there water in the refrigerator?

The answer can only be “It depends on who is asking, and why.” In what sense is “yes” true or false?

“In what sense?” is a characteristically meta-rational question. “Yes, there is water: in the cells of the eggplant” is true in some sense—probably not a useful one, although that depends on the asker’s purpose and the context. (Maybe they are going to clean the fridge with a chemical that would react violently with even the water in the cells of the eggplant.) It’s false in another, probably more relevant sense: something to drink.

Rational methods are often the best way to find truth. Recovering accurate, effective senses of “truth,” “belief,” and “rationality” requires major re-thinking, and much of The Eggplant is about that.

Our aim is not to undermine truth, to declare that it is “socially constructed” and therefore a matter of arbitrary tribal opinion, but to rescue it by giving a more detailed and accurate understanding than is possible in the rationalist framework.

Clouds and eggplants

Cirrus clouds

Exactly how many clouds are in this photograph?
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Dimitry B

Nebulosity is the central concept for In the Cells of the Eggplant. The book’s fundamental theme is “how does rationality relate to nebulosity, and how can we make that work better?”

Literally, nebulosity means “cloud-like-ness”:

  • Boundaries: Clouds do not have sharp edges; they thin out gradually at the margin. As you approach a cloud (in an airplane, or on a mountain hike), you cannot say quite when you have entered it.
  • Identity: It may be impossible to say where one cloud ends and another begins; whether two bits of cloud are part of the same whole or not; or to count the number of clouds in a section of the sky.
  • Categories: Cirrocumulus shades into cirrus and into altocumulus; clouds of intermediate form cannot meaningfully be assigned to one or another.
  • Properties: Depending on temperature and density, clouds may be white, gray, blue, or iridescent↗︎︎. There are no specific dividing lines between these colors. Clouds have diverse, highly structured shapes, which cannot be precisely described. First, because the edges are indistinct; and second because the shape is so complex that a full description would be overwhelmingly gigantic even were it possible. Yet meteorologists find useful phrases like “ragged sheets,” “wavy filaments,” “bubbling protuberances,” and “castle-like turrets.”

Clouds are an extreme case, but nebulosity is pervasive. Other than in mathematics and fundamental physics, nothing is ever definitely this-or-that. Everything is always somewhat this and somewhat that. Put under high enough magnification, a stainless steel ball exhibits the same indefiniteness as a cloud. No ball can be perfectly round, nor made of perfectly pure steel, nor can one definitely say whether some particular atoms are part of it or part of its surrounds.

“Gray areas” are the easiest way to think about nebulosity. Is it true that maroon is a shade of red? Well, pretty much, although it’s a bit of a gray area.

Questions of degree do not exhaust nebulosity, though. Consider “yes, there is some water in the fridge: in the cells of the eggplant.” The problem here is not one of a gray area between water and non-water. Nor are we factually uncertain whether or not there is water in the fridge, so scientific investigation could answer the question. It is not that the word “water” has two different meanings, referring to two different kinds of water. It is that what counts as water depends on what you want it for.

Part One of The Eggplant explains in detail why there are no “really truly true truths” about eggplant-sized objects. Mostly, the best we can get is “true for all practical purposes.” And most of the truths we use, even in the hard sciences, are “pretty much true” or “true as far as a particular purpose goes.” This raises occasional problems for rationality in practice, and causes serious difficulties for rationalism↗︎︎ as a theory.

Meta-rationality↗︎︎, the main subject of The Eggplant, addresses these issues effectively.

A credibility revolution in the post-truth era

Society is unraveling in the postmodern, post-truth era. Systemic institutions have lost their credibility and effectiveness. Material progress has slowed. The science replication crisis and the scarcity of exciting new technologies are symptoms.

These may have the same root causes—and meta-rationality↗︎︎ may be part of the solution.

Meta-rational reforms for credibility and creativity

Science and engineering don’t work like they used to.

Breakthroughs in scientific understanding are rarer, most scientific output is trivial, and much of it isn’t even true. Many sciences now face a “replication crisis↗︎︎”: most supposed knowledge in these fields turns out to have been false.

Breakthrough inventions are no longer common, as they were in the last century. There’s increasing concern that practical progress has slowed over the past few decades.1 Exponentially greater research and development spending yields fewer significant new products. Perhaps most importantly, medicine has advanced far more slowly than seemed likely a quarter century ago.

By definition, these are meta-rational problems. Science and engineering are rational systems that aren’t working as well as they should. Meta-rationality means evaluating, selecting, combining, creating, improving, and maintaining rational systems.

The meta-rational reformation: we can and must level up technical rationality at the institutional level, as well as at the individual one. The rational systems according to which research and development are funded, communicated, organized, evaluated, and rewarded date back to the mid-twentieth century and need extensive overhaul.2 This book mainly addresses meta-rationality as an individual or small group activity. However, it also points toward ways meta-rationality can improve nation-scale rational institutions.

The “credibility revolution” in social and personality psychology is proof that this is possible.3 These fields faced a replication crisis, touched off by a 2011 paper showing strong evidence for impossible precognition—evidence that was strong according to all the rational norms of the field at the time, anyway.4 That suggested that the criteria were inadequate, calling into question potentially everything the field thought it knew. Over the next few years, researchers repeated many key experiments, and found not only errors in specific claimed results, but that whole subfields were devoted to phenomena that do not exist.

To their great credit, social and personality psychology have reflected intensively on their failings; gained new understanding of how they went wrong; and made large changes in their own methods, standards, and institutional structures. All of this counts as meta-rational work. It has made results increasingly credible, and should be an inspirational model for many other fields. Unfortunately, some—most critically, medical research—actively resist reform.5

In engineering and science, there is also a crisis of creativity. Massive increases in funding have led to massive increases in output, as measured by products introduced, startups founded, patents filed, and academic papers published. Yet meaningful innovation seems increasingly scarce. Nearly all the output is useless, or trivial, or “me too” duplication with irrelevant variations.6 Most technical work is mechanical, by-the-book crank-turning, without reflection on whether it makes any sense or has any value in context. Only meta-rationality can help with that.7

Qualitative creativity—rather than quantitative productivity—requires better selection of research problems. What actually matters? It also requires reflection on the limits of methods. What actually works to create knowledge or innovations, not just publications or me-too products? This requires meta-rational investigation—and that requires actually caring about the subject matter, not just your career or the administrative imperatives of your institution.

Creativity flows from wonder, curiosity, play, and enjoyment.8 These feature prominently in biographies of great scientists and inventors. Current institutional arrangements discourage them, in favor of constant competitive pressure for mindless rote productivity.

Meta-rationality provides a possibility to profoundly rethink the nature, meaning, and practice of rational disciplines and institutions. The extraordinary improvements they have historically made in everyone’s lives, and their recent deceleration and corruption, makes reform urgent and important.9

The post-post-truth era

Things are falling apart. It’s not just science and engineering. Our societies, cultures, and selves also seem not to work as well as they used to.

The Eggplant is a part of a wider project, Meaningness. Its How Meaning Fell Apart explains that the modern world was built on a foundation of rationalism↗︎︎: ideological belief that some system is guaranteed correct. When rationalism failed, modernity ended.

We live now in “postmodernity,” resulting from abandoning rationality, universality, and coherence. Postmodernity features cultural triviality, political dysfunction, and nihilistic malaise. Rationality is under attack from irrationalists, newly empowered by the internet. They have proclaimed a “post-truth era↗︎︎” and have undermined or destroyed vital systematic institutions with “the truth depends on who is asking, and why.” This could produce a civilization-ending catastrophe.

Meta-rationality matters because rationality matters. Rule of law, public infrastructure, and our post-subsistence economy are all products of rationality. They can’t survive without it. Our future is at stake; questions about the nature of rationality are not abstract academic philosophy. Truth matters—which is why it is attacked. Recovering rationality is an urgent antidote.

On the other hand… the irrationalists are inadvertently correct that “the truth depends on who is asking, and why.” Contexts and purposes count for truth.

Postmodernity is the recognition that the claims of absolute truth which advertised the correctness and necessity of social and cultural systems were false. It’s not that the systems are altogether wrong; it’s that they were not The One True Way. Defenders initially doubled down on overly strong claims, and then gave up, rather than saying “those claims weren’t True, but they are true enough, because look, this works pretty well in practice.”

So modernity, and rationalism, cannot be restored. However, a more accurate, more credible, meta-rational understanding of rationality, including of the nature of truth, will make recovery possible. I believe we can, should, and will remodel society, culture, and ourselves on a meta-rational basis. That will deliver the benefits of rational modernity without its harms and errors.10 We might call it the “post-post-truth era.”

Most of The Eggplant is about meta-rationality as an individual activity, aiming only at improved professional practice. I’ve raised the broader issues here to show other reasons meta-rationality is important. Sailing the Seas of Meaningness addresses the wider implications for society, culture, and our selves.

We’ll return to these concerns occasionally throughout this book, “popping out” of concern with individual technical work, to relate that to bigger themes.

The structure of The Eggplant

Structure and function of the eggplant

In the Cells of the Eggplant is a book in five Parts. They cover:

  1. Rationalism: The standard theory of how and when and why technical rationality works—which is, unfortunately, inadequate and misleading
  2. Mere reasonableness: Everyday informal reasoning and activity, which turns out to be necessary to make formal rationality work
  3. Rationality: A better explanation for how and when and why it works
  4. Meta-rationality: More effective use of rational systems through understanding how they relate to their contexts
  5. Applications: Some ways we can apply meta-rationality in specific fields.

Part One: Rationalism

Rationalism is the theory that because rationality is based in mathematics, it must always work. Practical rationality is not just math, though; it is the application of systematic thinking in real-world situations. Rationalism lacks an adequate theory of how math relates to reality, and so fails to recognize that rationality, unlike mathematics, is is often unreliable. This has been well-understood for half a century. Unfortunately, rationalism is still widely held, because better explanations are not easily available.

The Eggplant provides an alternative understanding of rationality, and of how to do it better. It’s based mainly on observations about how and when and why rationality does work, covered in Part Three.

However, it’s also motivated by specific ways rationalism doesn’t work. So Part One explains many ways rationalism fails to explain how rationality works in practice, with an eye to finding better understandings. The overall diagnosis is that rationalism fails to take nebulosity↗︎︎ into account.

Part Two: Reasonableness

A better explanation for how, when, and why rationality works rests on an understanding of how, when, why mere reasonableness works. Reasonableness is thinking and acting that is not systematic, and therefore not technically rational, but that makes sense and is likely to work.

Informal reasoning is adequate for most everyday tasks. It usually deals with nebulosity effectively. How?

To find out, we need to take reasonableness seriously. We should not dismiss it—as rationalism often does—as irrelevant because it is irrational; nor imagine that it is a crude, weak-sauce approximation to true rationality. It addresses common issues systematic rationality can’t.

We need to investigate reasonableness as an empirical phenomenon. I will review some major features and dynamics of reasonable activity that have been discovered through rigorous observation. In summary, reasonableness works because it is context-dependent, purpose-laden, interactive, and tacit.

Part Three: Rationality

Systematic rationality aims for the opposite qualities: context-independence, purpose-independence, detachment, and explicitness. In some cases, it gains huge leverage by translating a problem from its nebulous real-world specifics into an abstract, formal realm. It solves the problem in that domain, and applies the formal solution to the real-world situation.

Why does rationality work? In large part, because we do practical work to make it work. We alter the world, as well as our thoughts and actions, to make them less nebulous, thereby making rationality more reliable.

Systematic rationality depends on reasonableness for three reasons:

  • It relies on reasonableness to translate between the nebulous real world and a clear-cut formal abstraction of it. In most cases, this is a complex and nebulous matter of interpretation and negotiation. These are non-rational, but reasonable, cognitive activities.
  • Perfect context-independence, purpose-independence, detachment, and explicitness can never be achieved. Rationality is, therefore, more similar to “mere reasonableness” than rationalism supposes.
  • In practice, formal reasoning is almost always intertwined with informal cognition.

Rationality, from the meta-rational viewpoint, is not the optimal method for discovering truths. It is a jumble of disparate methods of understanding, which work more or less well in different sorts of situations. That makes it no less valuable. And, taking this more realistic view of how, when, and why rational methods work can help us apply them more effectively.

Part Four: Meta-rationality

Meta-rationality is reasoning about what rational methods to use, and how, in a specific situation. Effective meta-rationality depends on an accurate understanding of how, when, and why reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality work.

Part Four explains how meta-rationality evaluates, selects, creates, improves, and maintains rational systems—by understanding how they relate to their contexts and purposes, and often by modifying their surrounds as well.

It treats topics such as problem selection and problem formulation, the creation and revision of taxonomies and standards, building systems, and figuring out when to abandon a rational approach for alternatives.

Part Five: Applications

This Part provides examples of meta-rationality in practice; ways it may be used in fields such as software development, statistics, and entrepreneurship. It relies on case studies such as the development of the transistor, the invention of knowledge management systems, and the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS.

Part One: Taking rationalism seriously

In the Cells of the Eggplant aims to level up rationality↗︎︎. As a first step, we need to understand how and when and why rationality works. Rationalism↗︎︎ is a theory about that. “Taking it seriously” implies investigating whether it is correct. We’ll find it isn’t.

We need a better understanding of rationality. Fortunately, one is available, and Part Three of The Eggplant explains it. So why not just start there?

Rationalism is the familiar, taken-for-granted understanding of rationality, accepted without much thought by most technical professionals. You learned it—largely by osmosis—in high school science classes. It’s simple and it makes sense. It’s a good-enough explanation of how you solved assigned coursework problems as an undergraduate. It’s uncommon to notice it’s not a good description of your experience of using rationality on the job, in the real world, after leaving school.

The Eggplant’s explanation of rationality is quite different, not just in content, but in “feel.” It relies on concepts you may not have encountered before, and that may seem strange or even repellent at first. If you jumped straight into Part Three, you might find its explanations alien, implausible, and complex in comparison with rationalism. The natural reaction: “this is weird nonsense; why not just rationalism?”

“Why not just rationalism” is half the agenda of Part One. Until one accepts that rationalism faces serious unresolved problems, not just as a philosophical theory but as a guide to practice, it’s difficult to take any alternative seriously.

Happily, it turns out that the specific ways rationalism is wrong point straight at a better understanding. That’s the other half of the agenda: causal diagnosis of rationalism’s many failure modes. That guides the construction of the alternative.

A pattern emerges: the overall reason rationalism can’t work. Every rationalist theory gets wrecked, in stormy seas of counterexamples, on the black reef of nebulosity↗︎︎.

This implies that the relationship between crisp rational systems and nebulous reality is key to understanding how and when and why rationality works. That leads naturally to the quite different understanding in Part Three.

The structure of Part One

The first three chapters of Part One are preliminary. They provide definitions of the subject matter, and introduce needed concepts. They also explain what sort of explanation The Eggplant aims for. It is not cognitive science, philosophy, or history. It is practical, not theoretical—although it often has to address theories, to dispel misconceptions that are misleading for practice.

Most of Part One works through a series of increasingly sophisticated, standard rationalist models that try to explain what it means to believe a true fact. That is a fundamental question for rationalism.

The aim here is not to conclusively refute these theories—because it is uncontroversial that each does fail. Rather, we will examine each in enough detail to find its root problem. Then it becomes plausible that no similar model can work. That suggests we need some quite different story.

Part One poses a potential danger. For many skilled in the use of technical rationality, rationalism is an important part of personal identity. Coming to understand how it is mistaken and sometimes harmful can be emotionally devastating. “Bypassing post-rationalist nihilism,” at the end of Part One, explains how to avoid that shock. If the first twinges of doubt in rationalism induce vertigo, it may be good to skip ahead to read that.

Rationality, rationalism, and alternatives

This chapter defines some key terms of In the Cells of the Eggplant: rationality, rationalism, reasonableness, and meta-rationality.

  • The book uses “rationality” to refer to systematic, formal methods for thinking and acting; not in the broader sense of “any sensible way of thinking or acting,” as opposed to irrationality.
  • “Rationalism” refers to any belief system that makes exaggerated claims about the power of rationality, usually involving a formal guarantee of correctness.
  • “Mere reasonableness” means thinking and acting in ways that make sense and are likely to work, but that are not formally rational.
  • “Meta-rationality” is informal (non-rational) reasoning about how to best use reasonable, rational, and meta-rational methods together in a particular context.

Rationality

Meanings of “rational” have multiplied and evolved over centuries, which can create confusion. In the broadest sense, it’s synonymous with “sensible.” In some narrow senses, it means using a specific mathematical system to decide what to do.

I will use it in an intermediate sense: rational methods are formal, systematic, explicit, technical, abstract, atypical, non-obvious ways of thinking and acting, which have some distinctive virtue relative to informal ones.1 “Methods” suggests that rationality is a practical activity: things we actually do, rather than a metaphysical ideal we should aspire to.

“Systematic” and “formal” are key criteria, but both are nebulous↗︎︎. They are a matter of degree. Mathematical logic is extremely formal; a chemistry methods manual is quite formal; a corporate personnel policy is somewhat formal; a “Do Today” task checklist is only barely formal. “System” is used vaguely to mean almost anything complicated. I’ll use it a little more specifically, as meaning a set of rules that can be printed in a book, which a person can consciously follow, and the activities and mechanisms that result.

Rationality works mainly with general knowledge. Ideally, it aims for universal truths. Typically, knowledge of a specific object does not count as “rational” unless it applies to every other object in some class. The glory of Newton’s theory of gravity is that it is true uniformly everywhere in the universe, equally for an apple and an asteroid.2 In fact, we’ll see that formal systems cannot deal with particular physical objects at all—one reason rationality is inadequate by itself.

Rationalism

I will use rationalism to mean any belief system that makes exaggerated claims about the value of rationality, going beyond the evidence of common experience. In the plural, rationalisms are diverse belief systems of this sort.

The most influential rationalisms attempt universality across domains: they are meant to apply in all situations and task types. Others are more specific: particular notions of rationality that apply only in mathematics, science, law, management, or accounting. The Eggplant considers mainly universal rationalisms, or ones meant to apply broadly in technical fields.

Typically, rationalisms attempt to form rational theories of rationality. That is, they seek systematic, explicit, technical, abstract, non-obvious explanations for how and why rationality works. Ideally, they aim for definite proof of rationality’s universal efficacy.

Typically, rationalisms specify some ultimate criterion according to which thinking or acting could be judged to be correct or optimal. Typically, rationalisms say that thinking in accordance with the criterion leads to true beliefs. They may also claim rationality yields maximally effective action.

For rationalism, ideal rationality means conforming to the criterion. Rationalism is normative: everyone ought to think and act that way, as nearly as possible. Rationality, according to most rationalisms, is fully adequate on its own.

Under this definition, “rationalism” must go beyond “formal methods are often useful, hooray!” That is the common experience: for anyone who uses such methods, their value is obvious.3 I will use rationalist to mean someone who promotes rationalism—rather than someone who just finds methods of systematic rationality often useful in practice.

Let’s consider a variety of claims about rationality, roughly from weaker to stronger:

  1. It is better to be rational than irrational
  2. Systematic rationality often works, so you should use it when appropriate
  3. Rationality (whose definition is left vague) is always good
  4. Rationality is all there is to thinking and acting well; it is sufficient for all purposes, and there’s nothing else you need
  5. Rationality is defined by such-and-such a criterion; you should conform to it as nearly as you can
  6. Certain specified methods meet the rationality criterion, so you should use them whenever you can
  7. There’s a single master method of rationality, which guarantees an optimal result

I think claims 1 and 2 are correct: formal rationality is hugely valuable and you should use it often. I will not count this as “rationalism.” Not everyone agrees, though. Let’s say that anti-rationalism is any worked-out denial of either 1 or 2. Meta-rationalism↗︎︎—the understanding presented in this book—is not anti-rationalism, since it affirms the value of rationality.

“Rationalism” might be defined as holding claim 4 (that rationality is always sufficient) or above. Meta-rationalism denies 4-7, so it is not rationalism.

Claim 3 is a vague attitude of alignment. If rationality means just “thinking and acting well,” then it is correct by definition. Also, claim 3 is importantly right if it’s just a rejection of anti-rationalism. On the other hand, a diffuse, incoherent rationalist faith is imparted implicitly in the science curriculum. There must be a correct way to think, some rationalists suggest, but we don’t know quite what it is; or they extol a vague principle like “the scientific method.” No one has been able to give a detailed, empirically adequate explanation of what “the scientific method” is, so advocating it is nearly vacuous.4

I think the stronger claims 4-7 are mistaken. Formal rationality is rarely if ever sufficient on its own in real-world situations; there’s no fixed criterion for rationality; nothing can be guaranteed by or about rationality in practice; and there is no method that is always rational to use.

Universal rationalisms are usually based on some bit of mathematics. They point out that the math is incontrovertibly correct, and base their supposed guarantees on that certainty. But rationality is not just solving mathematical puzzles; it is using that math in the real world, whose nebulosity makes guarantees impossible.

Distinguishing weaker and stronger claims about rationality may help correct both rationalist and anti-rationalist errors. I suspect many anti-rationalists react to overstated rationalist claims, rightly rejecting them, but then mistakenly go on to deny that systematic rationality is often valuable. I suspect many rationalists rightly wish to defend rationality’s genuine value, but mistakenly go on to affirm implausibly strong claims as well. Rationality does have “distinctive virtues” (which we’ll return to in Part Three); but these are nebulous and cannot be guaranteed.

Rationalism and nebulosity

Part One explains a series of specific technical difficulties rationalism encounters. Each failure mode has the same underlying cause: denial↗︎︎ of nebulosity.5

The problem with rationalism is not that it is false as an abstract philosophical theory. (Who cares?) The problem is that it is misleading in practice. It encourages you to overlook nebulosity, so you end up using rationality wrongly. This is not a minor or theoretical danger. The replication crisis has revealed that most supposed knowledge in many scientific fields, derived through misuse of rational methods, is false.

Rationalism is based on a fantasy of how we would like knowledge, action, and reality to work. It would be highly convenient if they did. In a world without nebulosity, in which objects and properties were perfectly crisp, rationality would be fully adequate. But we do not live in such a world. To the extent that rationality does work, it is largely because we have engineered our world to make it behave more nearly that way.

Non-rational, merely reasonable judgement is unreliable, sometimes uncomfortable, and leads to conflict when people get different answers. When they get stubborn about that, or when misjudgment leads to disaster, it’s easy to regard all “reasonableness” as simply irrational. The hope of rationalism is that some mechanical criterion or procedure could provide certainty, understanding, and control by eliminating non-rational factors. This is not possible, because rationality by itself can’t deal with the nebulous eggplant-sized world at all. Abstract, formal reasoning cannot reach into that realm; it requires reasonable activity as a bridge.

Romanticism

But Poetry! But Love! But Dreams!

Familiar rejections of rationalism fault it for neglecting aesthetics, emotions, consciousness, morality, spirituality, and so on. Philosophers call this the Romantic critique.

The Eggplant doesn’t address any of that at all. It doesn’t make that sort of argument. It neither agrees nor disagrees with Romanticism.

Instead, Part One explains how rationalism fails technically, on its own ground, in its own terms. Part Three gives a better explanation of rationality, again without addressing aesthetics, emotions, and so on. Those domains are important in other ways, and do have some bearing on the use of rationality, but they are incidental to the concerns of this book.

Reasonableness

In everyday usage, “rational” has an informal meaning of “thinking and acting in ways that make sense and are likely to work.” In this sense, “rational” is synonymous with “sensible.” It means “not stupid, crazy, or meaningless.” I will call this reasonableness, reserving “rationality” for systematic methods.6

Much of The Eggplant is about the relationship between these two. Understanding that relationship is a prerequisite for meta-rationality. Rationalism misunderstands reasonableness as a primitive approximation to rationality. In fact, it has somewhat different—though overlapping—functions. “Mere” reasonableness addresses the nebulosity of the everyday world effectively, which formal rationality can’t. Meta-rationality combines resources from reasonableness and rationality, plus ones of its own, to understand and act effectively in circumstances the others cannot manage.

I’ll use irrational to mean failure or refusal to think well or act effectively when you should. It means “unreasonable” or “nonsensical,” or “stupid” or “crazy,” in the non-clinical sense of those words. By this definition, irrationality is contrary to all three of reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. I will not use it to mean “not systematically rational.”

Meta-rationality and meta-rationalism

Meta-rationality means figuring out how to apply reasonableness and rationality in a specific situation, and skill in doing so. It is a word I made up, to cover insights about the use of rationality gathered from many disparate fields.7

Rationality and meta-rationality are complementary activities. Meta-rationality is not an alternative to rationality. Neither can operate without the other; they walk hand-in-hand.

Meta-rationality is not in the business of finding true beliefs or optimal actions. That’s rationality’s job. On the other hand, getting good at meta-rationality will make you more effective at rationality, and therefore better at finding true beliefs and optimal actions.

Meta-rationality selects and adapts rational methods to circumstances, so it is meaningless without rationality. Conversely, you cannot apply rationality without making meta-rational choices. However, since meta-rationality is rarely taught explicitly, it’s common to use only the simplest, default meta-rational criteria. Those are meta-rational nonetheless: there is no universal rational method, so in any situation you have to choose one and figure out how to apply it.

We’ll see that rationality cannot be applied to concrete problems without bringing in reasonableness as well. Meta-rationality usually involves understanding, and sometimes altering, the relationships between reasonableness and rationality in particular circumstances.

Meta-rationality is not the application of formal rationality to itself (as one might suppose from its name). Applying rationality to itself is a rationalist program. We’ll see that, because of nebulosity, reasoning about how to apply rationality cannot be formally rational. (But it should not be irrational or anti-rational either!)

Meta-rationalism is an understanding of how and when and why reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality work. Whereas rationality and meta-rationality are different sorts of things, rationalism and meta-rationalism are the same sort of thing: explanations of effective thought and action. Meta-rationalism finds rationalism an inadequate account, and offers a complete replacement.8 So, perhaps confusingly, while rationality and meta-rationality are complementary activities, rationalism and meta-rationalism are incompatible explanations.

Once you recognize that denial of nebulosity is the deep structure underlying each of the difficulties rationalism encounters, the solution approach is obvious: accept nebulosity from the beginning, and work with it, instead of trying to ignore or eliminate it. As a practice, meta-rationality does just that. As a theory, meta-rationalism is a more accurate account of the sort of world we live in; and so it gives better advice than rationalism in cases in which nebulosity matters.

  • 1. Some non-rational systematic religions and philosophies would also meet these criteria. There is a “demarcation problem” here. The usual meaning of “the demarcation problem↗︎︎” is to find a test that clearly distinguishes science from non-science. This seems to be impossible. Different sciences work quite differently, and have no single well-defined feature in common. However, the demarcation problems for both science and rationality are rarely an issue in practice. We know science and rationality when we see them, and can usually make a cogent argument for why a particular method or system is scientific or rational or not, even if there is no general rule.
  • 2. This applies to semi-formal rational systems as well. A company policy that said “employees must turn in their weekly timesheets by the following Thursday, except Bertrand” would not count as rational. In a rational policy, if Bertrand is an exception, it must be as an instance of a class. For example, if Bertrand is an exception because he’s on a secret solo dogsled expedition to the South Pole, a rational policy would be “employees must turn in their timesheets by the following Thursday, unless they are out of internet range, in which case they must turn it in by the Thursday following their return to civilization.”
  • 3. In “Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable,” I discuss irrationalists who simply don’t understand that formal methods are often useful, and anti-rationalists who oppose systematic rationality for aesthetic, political, religious, or “spiritual” reasons. Since the European Enlightenment, anti-rationalism has mainly been suppressed in favor of a consensus in favor of rationality among the powerful. There are ominous signs that this consensus is now failing. See “A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse.”
  • 4. This is the demarcation problem again. It seems that any set of criteria for what counts as scientific winds up excluding some things that most scientists agree are science, and/or including some thing that aren’t. False positives typically include “pseudoscience,” meaning work that presents itself as science, and meets most or all typical criteria, but is clearly bogus.
  • 5. In the language of Meaningness, this is a form of eternalism↗︎︎. Equivalently, it is the fixation↗︎︎ of patterns↗︎︎ as ontological absolutes. I mostly don’t use these terms in The Eggplant.
  • 6. Although the concept is familiar to everyone, there seemed to be no standard academic term for “reasonableness” when I began writing about it in 2017. Interestingly, a 2020 paper found that lay people recognize the distinction, and do use the words “reasonable” and “rational” for it. Igor Grossman et al., “Folk standards of sound judgment: Rationality Versus Reasonableness↗︎︎,” Science Advances 8 January 2020.
  • 7. A few people have used the term “meta-rationality” with similar meanings before, in passing, but I don’t know of any previous detailed account. The most extensive previous use I’ve found is in Chapter 6 of Keith Stanovich’s Decision Making and Rationality in the Modern World↗︎︎. He uses the term to mean reflection on one’s preferences and on the consequences of choices in a decision-theoretic framework. This use is compatible with mine, although a narrower conception, and not elaborated in much detail.
  • 8. Logically, there could be multiple meta-rationalisms: different theories about the relationships among reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. Currently, there is not even one fully worked-out version, so meta-rationalisms in the plural are only hypothetical.

Rationalism’s responses to trouble

Rube Goldberg machine

Rube Goldberg’s self-operating napkin, colored by Todd Van Hoosear↗︎︎

Rationalism↗︎︎’s promise, that rationality works uniformly and universally, runs into difficulties when it encounters nebulosity↗︎︎. It tries ignoring the trouble, but nebulosity won’t go away. Then rationalism adds more machinery to the contraption.

Rationality↗︎︎ aims mainly at finding true beliefs. Part One of The Eggplant catalogs a series of rationalist theories of truth and belief. Each fails in an apparently different way—although nebulosity is the underlying cause in each case. As it becomes apparent that each theory is inadequate, rationalism bolts on additional complications in an attempt to handle the problem, producing another, more complex theory.

The five sections of this chapter explain this general evolutionary pattern of rationalist theories, and how Part One addresses it.

  • Meta-rationalism↗︎︎, the view of The Eggplant, is not a philosophical theory; it’s practical, not theoretical.
  • Rationalism is a philosophical theory, so we have to discuss it partly in philosophical terms.
  • Rationalism, encountering nebulosity, attempts to reinterpret it as linguistic vagueness, or as uncertainty. That doesn’t work because nebulosity is distinct from the other two issues.
  • Rather than accepting nebulosity as the underlying cause, which needs to be treated at the root, rationalism tries to work around particular symptoms by adding formal machinery. In each case the machinery doesn’t do even that, and instead creates counter-productive complexity.
  • Part One roughly recapitulates the history of rationalism from the late 1800s (when formal logic was invented) to the 1960s (when rationalism conclusively failed). However, Part One’s structure follows the intrinsic pattern of successive inevitable problems and their attempted solutions, rather than a historical narrative.

Eventually, rationalism became a unwieldy mess of ad hoc machinery that still couldn’t explain key observations. One may simply hope someone can somehow make it work someday. However, analysis of the anomalies, followed by fundamental re-thinking, leads naturally to the quite different, meta-rational alternative.

Rationalism is philosophy; The Eggplant isn’t

Part One may sound like philosophy at first. Reading it like that might result in missing its point.

Rationalism is a philosophical theory. It’s difficult to point out problems with a philosophical position without sounding like philosophy. Also, only philosophers have treated many of the topics of this Part. So, unfortunately, it’s impossible to avoid using some philosophical jargon terms—explained in the next section.

However, The Eggplant is not philosophical. The book is not about clever arguments, or seeking the ultimate truth of some matter. Its sources and goals are practical, not theoretical. The aim is mundane: more effective ways of thinking and acting in technical work.

Rather than attempting to conclusively refute rationalism,1 Part One shows how it encounters predictable patterns of practical problems when it collides with nebulosity. What do these difficulties imply for our use of rationality? Specific ways rationalism fails point to specific features of the meta-rational alternative (explained in Part Three). You may come to find that more useful and more plausible.

The problems I point out are well-known and widely discussed. I review them here only because I couldn’t find a discussion elsewhere which covers the issues with minimal philosophical and historical baggage, and at the right level of detail. For readers interested in exploring further, Part One frequently footnotes The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Theory and Reality↗︎︎ is a good introduction to the philosophy of science, and covers several of the issues.

My presentation of these well-known difficulties is unusual in pointing out how each stems from the same root: failure to take nebulosity into account. This pattern recurs because rationalism’s goal is to prove that rationality is guaranteed correct or optimal, and nebulosity makes that impossible.

After explaining each problem, Part One summarizes an alternative, meta-rational approach, which works with nebulosity effectively. These brief discussions foreshadow more detailed explanations in later Parts, which will sound much less like philosophy. Parts Two and Three are based on detailed observations of how people actually do things, and sound more like anthropology. Parts Four and Five are pragmatic guides to how to use rationality; they sound more like engineering, or research management.

The problems rationalism treats as theoretical and philosophical, for which it wants to find uniform, universal, formal solutions, meta-rationality treats instead as practical hassles. Hassles can’t be “solved,” but they can be managed reasonably effectively by devising social practices and by engineering physical objects.

Unavoidable philosophy jargon

“Epistemology” and “ontology.” If you find these terms from philosophy off-putting, you are in good company. They are ugly, and it’s hard to remember which is which.

However, rationalism describes itself as a theory of epistemology, so we can’t do without that one. And ignoring ontology is its fundamental failing, so we’re stuck with that too.

An epistemology is an explanation of knowing. For academic philosophy, key epistemological questions are: “What is knowledge? What is a belief? How can we get true beliefs and eliminate false ones?” In this book, we’ll be more interested in everyday epistemological questions like “should I take the grocer’s word for it that Thai eggplants can substitute for regular ones?” and scientific questions like “how do we know whether zinc prevents colds?” But ontology is more important than epistemology for The Eggplant.

An ontology is an explanation of what there is.2 Key ontological questions for philosophy are: “What fundamental categories of things are there? What properties and relationships do they have?” For The Eggplant, ontology is more about “do Thai eggplants count as eggplants at all” and “does this new respiratory virus count as a ‘cold’ virus?”

Answers to ontological questions mostly can’t be true or false. Categories are more or less useful depending on purposes. Borges’ fictional encyclopedia3 categorizes animals as:

  1. those that belong to the Emperor,
  2. embalmed ones,
  3. those that are trained,
  4. suckling pigs,
  5. mermaids,
  6. fabulous ones,
  7. stray dogs,
  8. those included in the present classification,
  9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
  10. innumerable ones,
  11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
  12. others,
  13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
  14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

This is a bad ontology, for any imaginable purpose, but it is not false.

Ontology is intrinsically, irreparably nebulous. Whether or not an object belongs to a category often does not have a definite, true or false answer. For example:

  • It may be gradual: When does a rotting eggplant cease to be an eggplant and become something else? That’s a “gray area.”
  • It may be purpose-dependent: Whether or not there is water in the refrigerator depends on why you care. If you are looking for something to drink, an eggplant probably won’t do—but if you are in a bio lab and the small amount of water vapor continually emitted by an eggplant would ruin the sample you were thinking of storing in the refrigerator, a warning that there is water in the refrigerator could be important.

“Nebulous” does not mean subjective, arbitrary, or merely in your head. An eggplant is not a good way to slake thirst; and that is not a matter of opinion.

Ontologies can’t be true, but some are effective for their purposes. Organizing tasks in your to-do list software into projects and categories may improve your life.

Ontological questions depend on context and purpose. Contexts and purposes are endlessly variable. I’ll often use the term unenumerable to point to the practical impossibility of taking into account all factors that could potentially bear on specific situations. Useful truths must have practical implications for concrete problems. Universal, absolute truths cannot take into account unenumerable factors—and so mostly cannot be useful.

Meta-rational epistemology takes this nebulosity of truth, knowledge, and belief into account.

Vagueness, uncertainty, and nebulosity

Let’s consider three obstacles to rationality, and how rationalism addresses them:4

Representational vagueness:
Inability to fix quite what a sentence, formula, or model means, and so how it relates to reality.
Epistemological uncertainty:
Both “known unknowns”: whether a statement is true or false due to insufficient evidence; and “unknown unknowns”: relevant factors whose existence you are unaware of.
Ontological nebulosity:
The fizzy, fuzzy, fluid indefiniteness of the world itself.

These all have a similar flavor—they could all be covered by a word like “fuzziness.” They all make it difficult to say that particular statements are definitely true or false. Ultimately, they are inseparable, and they are often confused in practice. However, the conceptual distinctions are helpful.

Rationalism mainly concerns itself with the first two obstacles. Those are about human cognition, so it may seem that rationality could overcome them. We can sharpen our language and gather more data, and then maybe eventually, or at least in principle, rationalism could deliver on its guarantee. Nebulosity is about the world, so it can’t be fixed, and rationalism tries to ignore it.

Encountering representational vagueness, rationalism considers ordinary language defective, and tries to replace it with alternative, more precise systems. For instance, formal logic was designed partly as an antidote to linguistic ambiguity.

Sometimes sharper representations are valuable. The move to formalism is much of what gives rational methods their power.

Fully eliminating vagueness turns out to be infeasible, however. And, the attempt is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what ordinary language is for, and how it works. Ordinary language contains extensive resources for working with nebulosity. These get lost when you replace it with technical abstractions. Part Two, on reasonableness, explains some of them.

For meta-rationalism, ordinary language is not defective; it is well-suited to its actual purpose. Meta-rationality coordinates ordinary language’s nebulosity-clarifying methods with rational methods of formal notation.

Encountering uncertainty, rationalism asks “on what basis can we know whether this is true?” It assumes that well-formed statements are either absolutely true or absolutely false, that the problem of knowledge is to find out which, and that rationality is the solution. Of course, some things are true, and rational methods for determining truth can be highly effective in some situations.

Unfortunately, uncertainty can never be entirely eliminated, and formal reasoning methods don’t cope with it well. Probabilistic rationality handles some cases, but not all. “Unknown unknowns”—relevant factors you have not considered at all—can’t be incorporated into any formal system. Formal treatment of an uncertain fact requires specifying it in advance.

As we’ll see in Part Three, we can work effectively with unknown unknowns, but not in a formally rational framework.

Encountering ontological nebulosity, rationalism typically misinterprets it as either representational vagueness or epistemological uncertainty. However, nebulosity is not a matter of linguistic sloppiness or of ignorance, but of there existing no definite, absolutely true answers to most questions—however they are stated.

Nebulosity negates any possibility of strong claims for rationality. Most rationalisms could work only if beliefs were either absolutely true or absolutely false. That means they need to deny or ignore nebulosity. If you start exploring ontological questions, nebulosity becomes obvious, so rationalisms generally work hard to ignore them all, considering epistemology only.

But completely separating epistemology and ontology is impossible. Most beliefs are about things that are inherently nebulous. Then whether a belief is true or false is also nebulous—to some degree. Most facts about clouds and eggplants are not absolutely true, only true-enough for some purpose. Mostly the best we can get are “pretty much true” truths. No amount of additional information would resolve these into absolute ones. Part One is largely about why that is, what it implies.

Rationalism often bases explicit denials of nebulosity on fundamental physics. There are two steps in the typical argument. Subatomic particles have absolutely definite properties, described by quantum field theory, which is absolute truth. (Let us grant this claim for the sake of the argument.5) The second step: everything is made out of particles, so everything is also absolutely definite. Thus, the world is well-behaved, and there is an absolute truth to everything, even if we currently don’t know it. Quantum physics gives the correct ontology; that’s a solved problem.

The second step doesn’t follow (as we’ll see later). Quantum physics doesn’t have much to say about what I’ll call “the eggplant-sized world.” That extends from roughly the size of bacteria up—although size as such is not the issue. It is that the objects, categories, properties, and relationships we care about are not, in practice, understandable in quantum terms. Yet we can and do apply rationality effectively at the eggplant scale; this needs an alternative explanation (in Part Three).

Part One repeatedly asks: “What sort of world would rationalism be true of?” What would it take to make a guarantee about rationality that could stick? Broadly, the answer is: a world without nebulosity; a world in which all objects, categories, properties, and relationships were perfectly definite.

Adding machinery

The rationalisms I discuss each take their criterion of rationality from some particular formal system. They promise correctness or optimality based on the reasons the formalism is correct or optimal in its own terms. For instance, if you start from absolutely true beliefs, logic allows you to find other absolutely true beliefs. This fact about logic is true, absolutely.

Each rationalism fails when its idealized concepts of truth and belief collide with some nebulous aspect of the world. A proof that a formal system works correctly internally is irrelevant to the question of how it relates to the concrete external world. Rationalisms direct your attention away from that, because none has a worked-out explanation of how formalism engages with clouds, eggplants, or jam. Meta-rationalism does explain that, and it emphasizes the value of paying attention to the interface.

Each rationalist theory failed for practical, technical reasons. From the outside, one can see that nebulosity was the underlying cause in each case; but viewed from inside, each trouble spot looked quite different, and it seemed reasonable that an additional technical device could fix it. So, encountering difficulty, rather than saying “this whole project seems not to be working, we need to step back and come up with Plan B,” rationalists plowed ahead, creating more complex variants of their system. Each rationalism added more conceptual machinery of its favorite type, rather than asking if that type of machinery was suitable for the job.6

  • Whenever it became clear that standard mathematical logic could not handle a particular problem, logicists bolted on more logic-stuff that was supposed to address it. When you point out that the extension doesn’t actually come to grips with the problem, and that it’s incompatible with all the other extensions, logicists say “well, yes, but something like this has to work.”
  • When you point out that probabilistic inference always depends on debatable, somewhat arbitrary choices in setting up a problem description, probabilists suggest that you could try all possibilities in parallel.7 When you point out that this is impossible, they say “well, yes, but it’s the correct approach in principle.”

Rationalisms have some response to every objection. Critics point out that the responses don’t work. Rationalists respond in turn; such disputes often go many layers deep. To make Part One finite, we’ll only take the analysis a couple of steps in any direction.

Eventually one just has to say “This contraption has gotten awfully complicated, and mostly doesn’t seem to work in practice. Perhaps you will be able fix it someday with even more machinery, but that seems increasingly unlikely. And we do have a better alternative!”

This is not history

Nowadays, rationalism operates only as a metaphysical belief system: an unfounded certainty, based on imaginary understanding, that rationality must somehow always work.8

Historically, though, rationalism was a serious and credible intellectual project: to justify rationality by applying it to itself. The goal was a well-defined, detailed, rational explanation of what rationality is and why it works. Initially, there was no obvious reason this should not have succeeded.

Part One presents a series of rationalist theories that roughly recapitulate the development of rationalist thought. However, the goal here is not historical detail or accuracy, but understanding the intrinsic reasons that made each added complication necessary—as the failure modes of successive models came into view.9

Beginning with the Ancient Greeks, rationalists strengthened and elaborated the theory that rationality is the correct or optimal way of thinking and acting. They developed arguments that, for instance, Reason should be the Monarch that rules the Passions. Although increasingly sophisticated, these now seem naive and confused. By the mid-1700s rationalist theories were starting to turn up troubling anomalies.

It was only when armed with mathematical logic, developed in the late 1800s, that rationalists could tackle seriously the questions “so what is rationality exactly?” and “what proof do we have that it always works?” It was a major shock to discover, starting in the 1930s, that we can’t say exactly what it is, and it doesn’t always work. Tested seriously, rationalism fails not for one reason, but for dozens, any one of which would be fatal. The intellectual powertools logicians developed to prove rationalism correct instead proved the opposite.

  • 1. Rationalism, taken seriously, requires operations that do not seem possible in practice. As philosophy, rationalism suggests that they must nevertheless be possible in principle. I believe they are mainly not possible even in principle, and sometimes I will sketch reasons. These partial theoretical explanations provide intuitions, rather than a knock-down philosophical proof. Philosophical proofs occasionally change individual philosophers’ minds, but never seem to defeat philosophical positions. Ways of thinking eventually go out of fashion, but not because someone shows they are definitively wrong. Showing a better alternative is more effective. Even then, philosophy progresses one funeral at a time; no position is so silly that diehards will cease defending it.
  • 2. The term “ontology” is itself highly nebulous, with no generally accepted definition, and different philosophers use it differently. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Logic and Ontology↗︎︎.”
  • 3. The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge↗︎︎ is an imaginary encyclopedia quoted by Jorge Luis Borges in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” The non-fictional Wilkins proposed↗︎︎ a formal, rational ontology in 1668. Borges’ essay suggests that this is impossible.
  • 4. There are more obstacles to rationality than these three. For example, computational complexity theory puts practical limits on reasoning; this book doesn’t discuss that.
  • 5. There are two grounds for doubt: quantum indeterminacy, and physicists’ certainty that the existing quantum field theory is not correct. Nothing in The Eggplant relies on these doubts, however, so it simplifies the discussion to ignore them.
  • 6. Philip E. Agre’s Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎, pages 38-48, discusses this pattern in depth. “Ideas are made into techniques, these techniques are applied to problems, practitioners try to make sense of the resulting patterns of promise and trouble, and revised ideas result. Inasmuch as the practitioners’ perceptions are mediated by their original worldview, and given the near immunity of such worldviews from the pressures of practical experience, the result is likely to be a series of steadily more elaborate version of a basic theme. The general principle behind this process will become clear only once the practitioners’ worldview comes into question, that is, when it becomes possible to see this worldview as admitting alternatives. Until then, the whole cycle will make perfect sense in its own terms, except for an inchoate sense that certain general classes of difficulties never seem to go away.”
  • 7. Solomonoff induction↗︎︎ is a popular version of this ruse.
  • 8. In the language of Meaningness, rationalism is an eternalism.
  • 9. Historians may be offended by my impressionistic narrative, objecting that I’ve omitted important developments, lumped together people who had significant disagreements, and simplified subtle philosophical theories to the point of inaccuracy.

Positive and logical

Bertrand Russell in 1957

Bertrand Russell, logicist

The great thing about math is that it’s certain. If something is mathematically true, you can be absolutely sure of it, because a mathematical proof is unarguably correct.

The set of rules for mathematical proofs is predicate logic, which guarantees absolute truth, so—some rationalists↗︎︎ believe—they are the essence of rationality.

In the first half of the twentieth century, logical positivism attempted to marry predicate logic with scientific empiricism—which means generalizing from specific experimental data to universal truths.1 Proponents expected to create a complete and unassailable proof that this theory of rationality was correct.

Logical positivism conclusively failed around 1960, after multiple unfixable classes of trouble appeared. It was, however, the last serious attempt to build a general-purpose rationalism.

By “serious,” I mean that there was no known reason the project should fail when it began. In fact, there was every reason for excitement that it would succeed. Since its failure, no serious version of rationalism has been attempted, because no one has found plausible ways of dealing with the problems logical positivism encountered.

Logicism and probabilism

Epistemology↗︎︎ traditionally distinguished “rationality” from “empiricism.” Rationality—correct thinking—derived new knowledge by deduction from existing knowledge, or from intuition. Empiricism derived new knowledge from sensory experience.

Rationalism and empiricism were opposing theories, and different epistemologists advocated one or the other↗︎︎. But by the late 1800s, it became clear that knowledge rests on reasoning and experience. In common usage, the word “rationality” now covers both. Logical positivism was one attempt to combine them.

On the other hand, “intuition,” which tradition considered an indispensable part of “rationality,” proved unreliable. People’s intuitions differ. When deductions differ, they can be made public and checked against each other. Intuitions are inherently private, so there is no way to resolve disagreements.

Part One of The Eggplant covers two major varieties of rationalism, which I’ll call logicism and probabilism.2 These are modern descendants of the rationalist and empiricist traditions, respectively.3 They are based on two mathematical systems, predicate logic and probability theory. Logical positivism took a logicist approach initially, but later incorporated probabilism as well.

Logic explains how you can deduce true sentences from other true sentences. From “All ravens are black” and “Huginn is a raven,” you can deduce “Huginn is black.” Classical logic (codified by Aristotle and mostly unchanged until the 1800s) had multiple well-known defects. The next several chapters cover various attempts to fix them by adding technical machinery. Some were successful to some degree, but overall the logicist project failed. Hardly anyone takes logic seriously as epistemology nowadays. Since formal logic is ancient history, it’s easy to ignore it, and many contemporary rationalists do.4

But it’s important to understand how and why logicism can’t work, because other rationalisms face the same problems, and because there are good reasons to think that no rationalist solutions are possible. Many errors of contemporary rationalism are due to ignorance of these issues.

Logical positivism

The overall logical positivist plan:

  1. Apply rationality to itself. Use logic to prove that logic (as the correct account of rationality) works, and therefore is indeed rational. This “obviously must” be true, but we need to verify it, and then we’ll have an absolutely certain foundation before applying logic to other things.
  2. Use logic to prove that mathematics is correct. Eliminate the known problems that were bedeviling mathematics at the time, by clarifying definitions and inferences.
  3. Prove that the mathematical, scientific understanding of the world is correct, partly by proving that scientific empiricism is reliable.
  4. Fix all the squishy stuff like ethics and aesthetics and religion by reducing them to science.

Step 4 may have looked a bit iffy, but the others seemed like they should be straightforward. However, even step 1 failed.

The first difficulties the logical positivists ran into were inside logic itself, rather than in the attempt to connect it with empiricism. Some defects in logic were addressed, more-or-less adequately, with heroic effort.5 Eventually, Kurt Gödel and others proved mathematically that some defects cannot be fixed, even in principle. Logic is inherently somewhat broken, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.6

Specifically, what I said at the beginning of this chapter turned out to be false:

If something is mathematically true, you can be absolutely sure of it, because a mathematical proof is unarguably correct.

There are mathematical truths that can’t be proven.7 This was a major shock. The promise of rationalism was that, by rational methods, we can eventually come to know anything that is true. The modern worldview held that rationality’s power had no inherent bounds.

The discovery of several fundamental limits to what can be known—quantum indeterminacy was another—produced a crisis of confidence that eventually led to postmodernity. That is defined as “incredulity toward all grand narratives”; rationalism was central to most. Logic had been advertised as “the laws of thought”; so do its unfixable flaws mean that we cannot trust our own minds? Mid-century anti-rationalists gleefully seized on successive failures of rationalism to justify all sorts of harmful nonsense.

Step 2—proving mathematics correct—also failed. I won’t go into that, because the issues are highly technical. Also, mathematics mostly works, and it appears that its internal problems are irrelevant to its applications in science, engineering, economics, and so on.

The problem of induction

Logical positivists thought the problem of induction↗︎︎ was the main difficulty in step 3. What rational procedure should we use to find universal truths? How much evidence about specific cases is adequate to verify a general conclusion? The difficulty is that it doesn’t matter how many black ravens you see, you can’t conclude “all ravens are black,” because maybe there’s a white one↗︎︎ somewhere you haven’t seen.

Late in logical positivism’s evolution, after decades of failing attempts to find an absolute verification criterion, proponents reluctantly concluded that one could only have degrees of belief in universal truths; full confidence is impossible. Maybe, though, if you see more black ravens, you ought to be more confident they’re all black. Or at least that most are!

Probability theory was invented originally as a tool for winning at gambling. Some epistemologists developed it instead as a tool for understanding what “more confident” means. A great advance: theoretically, by emphasizing that you don’t simply believe that statements are true or false; and practically, because probability theory is uniquely effective in certain circumstances.

Logical positivists attempted to unify predicate logic with probability theory. That failed; even now it hasn’t been accomplished as mathematical system, much less as a philosophy of science. Nevertheless, probabilism replaced logicism as the dominant school of rationalism in the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, as an overall theory of belief, it is a non-starter. It has almost all the same problems as logic, plus others of its own, as we shall see.

Silence in the aftermath

By the 1960s, the obstacles to logical positivism seemed insuperable, and everyone gave up. Unfortunately, no one ever bothered to write a clear or detailed account of the reasons it failed, so every decade or two some movement reinvents it.

Here’s a 1976 interview with logical positivism’s former proponent A. J. Ayer:

MAGEE: Now logical positivism must have had actually some real defects. What do you now, in retrospect, think the main shortcomings of the movement were?

AYER: I suppose the greatest defect is that nearly all of it was false.

MAGEE: I think you need to say a little more about that.

AYER: Perhaps that’s being too harsh on it. I still want to say that it was true in spirit in a way, that the attitude was right. But if one goes for the details, first of all the verification principle [that is, the hypothetical correct way to do scientific induction] never got itself properly formulated. I tried several times and it always let in either too little or too much, and to this day it hasn’t received a properly logically precise formulation. Then, the reductionism just doesn’t work. You can’t reduce statements, even ordinary simple statements about cigarette cases and glasses and ashtrays, to statements about sense data, let alone more abstract statements of science.

Typical discussions of the movement’s collapse cover only the foundational crisis in logic and the failure to solve the problem of induction. That gives the hopeful impression that if these two issues were overcome or bypassed, we could have a workable general epistemology. As for the first difficulty, we’ve learned that the internal mathematical problems are merely technical, with no practical consequences. As for the second, scientists increasingly adopted statistical software that promised reliable, automated answers to the problem of induction. “P<0.05↗︎︎! Take that, ivory-tower philosophical naysayers!”

However, we’ll see that logical positivism failed for several other reasons.8 These probably must afflict any other rationalism equally. Because these obstacles are less well-known, rationalists keep reinventing pentagonal wheels. (Logicism itself gets periodically rediscovered as “laws of thought” for artificial intelligence.)

A serious contemporary rationalism would have to acknowledge and address the difficulties explicitly.

  • 1. “Positivism” is a vague word that in “logical positivism” means pretty much the same as “scientific empiricism.” The category “logical positivism” is also nebulous; different thinkers and works are included or not by different historians. I will use it in the broadest, vaguest sense possible: as including “logical atomism” and “logical empiricism” (sometimes treated as separate movements), and as stretching into the 1950s work of, for example, Carnap and Reichenbach. It definitely doesn’t include logicism in artificial intelligence research, though, despite close similarities.
  • 2. I am using the terms “logicism” and “probabilism” in ways that are reasonably mainstream but somewhat broader than is typical. “Logicism” in one narrower sense refers only to a position in the philosophy of mathematics. It is also used to refer to the logic-based research program in artificial intelligence.
  • 3. There are other modern rationalisms, but logicism and probabilism are the most influential, and the others face most of the same problems.
  • 4. Math students may learn some basics for use in proofs. Analytic philosophy students also get a bit because it’s supposed to help you think clearly, and it was important in the founding of their field. However, most universities no longer teach the subject seriously in either the math or philosophy department. It’s extremely cool stuff, even though it doesn’t work! Understanding logic does help you think clearly, although mostly not for the reasons it was supposed to. If a university course is not available, “Teach Yourself Logic↗︎︎” is a valuable guide.
  • 5. Russell and Whitehead’s type theory is the central example. It was an extraordinarily complex and difficult fix for a technical problem that had no significant implications for the overall project.
  • 6. I’m using the word “broken” informally. More precisely, there are several features you’d want and expect logic to have, but you can’t get all of them at once. There are many different systems of mathematical logic, each of which fails to provide at least one of the desired functions. It’s possible to prove that there isn’t some correct, better system that combines all of them.
  • 7. “Some mathematical truths can’t be proven” is a somewhat impressionistic statement of Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem. The precise statement is highly technical and not needed here.
  • 8. Some of these other problems were partly understood by some of the founders of logical positivism, notably Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein. They proposed alternative ways forward. Their new approaches acknowledged ontological nebulosity, worked with it, and pointed in meta-rational directions. Their accounts are difficult, vague, confused, and wrong in details, but they got some bits importantly right. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎ is a seminal text of meta-rationalism. Ironically, histories describe it as one of the seminal texts of analytic philosophy, a rationalist school that has carefully ignored the book’s main insights. A fine explanation of that disjuncture is Ian Ground’s “The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein↗︎︎,” The Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2017.

The world is everything that is the case

Ludwig started scowling early and never stopped

Ludwig Wittgenstein as a child, 1890s. Plus: the world.

The oldest, simplest theory says you have a list of sentences in your head. Each is labeled with whether you believe it is true or false. Separately, each is actually true or false in the world.

Inside your head:

Sentence Believed
Water is H2O True
George Washington was the first American President True
The eggplant is a fruit False
All ravens are black True
Before Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat True
Snow is white True

Outside your head:

Fact Truth
Water is H2O True
George Washington was the first American President True
The eggplant is a fruit False
All ravens are black True
Before Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat False
Snow is white True

So you have one wrong belief (the one about Columbus). Rationality was supposed to be the way you fix it. Inside and outside should correspond, and when they do, you are done.

Rationalist↗︎︎ philosophers held this Aristotelian view for more than two thousand years, going back to Ancient Greece. It seems at first to accord with common sense, and it is adequate much of the time.

However, in everyday reasonable↗︎︎ activity we automatically abandon it for more sophisticated methods when it doesn’t work:

“So are Hannah and Martin having an affair, or what?”
“Sort of… They haven’t actually done it, but they spent hours kissing on a park bench last night.”

This expresses ontological↗︎︎ nebulosity↗︎︎: two people may be definitely having an affair, or definitely not, but there’s also Facebook Relationship Status↗︎︎ “It’s Complicated.” Is “they are having an affair” true, or false? Neither. “Sort of.”

“Has Ludwig fed the dog?”
“Yeah… I think so… pretty sure… I heard him banging around in the hall when he got home.”

This expresses a degree of confidence, or strength of belief, which Aristotelian logic ignored. It also includes a reason, which tradition treated as a separate issue, but which in everyday practice often seems integral to believing.

I believe in America!

Is “America” something that could be true or false? Is believing in the same sort of thing as believing that, or a separate phenomenon that would need a different explanation? Maybe the statement is an abbreviation for “I believe that America is good”; but “America is good” is so vague and nebulous that it doesn’t seem that could be either true or false either.

The chapter on reasonable epistemology in Part Two catalogs many more types of believings that don’t accord with logic, but which function effectively in context. Logic is meant to correct errors in everyday reasoning; and there is value in that. However, as we’ve just seen, everyday reasonableness can deal effectively with issues that traditional logic can’t.

Over the millennia, philosophers also found several intrinsic, technical problems with the Aristotelian framework. Here’s one: Suppose someone tells you that the present king of France is bald.1 Is that true? Since there is no present king of France, it doesn’t seem to be. So, according to Aristotelian theory, it’s false. In that case, its negation must be true. “The present king of France is not bald.” However, that also doesn’t seem to be true, so it must be false. But a statement and its negation can’t be both false (according to the Law of the Excluded Middle↗︎︎).

In fact, every part of traditional logical epistemology↗︎︎ is wrong. Knowledge is not made of true beliefs; beliefs aren’t sentences; you don’t simply believe that statements are true or false; there is no list of beliefs in your head. Beliefs can’t be true or false of the world, either—not in a way that could make this sort of theory work.

However, the main features of the theory have been retained up to the present, with modifications and elaborations. Most of the remaining chapters of Part One each explain one way the simple theory doesn’t work; a more complicated version invented to try to deal with the failure; and why that doesn’t work either.

The problem is not with any of the details. It’s that the whole approach is wrong.

Truth and belief are not central topics for meta-rational↗︎︎ epistemology. Its central topic is ways of understanding, and how they enable effective activity. Sometimes—not always—“truths” and “beliefs” are involved. Meta-rationality takes these as informal categories of diverse, nebulous phenomena, whose nature may require case-by-case investigation in context—not as uniform, metaphysical fundamentals, the way rationalism does.2

  • 1. This example is due to Bertrand Russell, who developed an attempted solution↗︎︎ (“On Denoting↗︎︎,” Mind XIV:4 (1905) pp. 479–493). This “problem of existential import↗︎︎” was discovered by the logician Peter Abelard↗︎︎ (Dialectica, circa 1115). Gottlob Frege’s discovery of the existential quantifier, discussed in the next chapter, was the basis of all modern solution attempts.
  • 2. “The world is everything that is the case” is the first sentence, and the central thesis, of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus↗︎︎, one of the central texts of logical positivism. “Positivism” is sometimes defined as the claim that the world is nothing more than the list of all true statements. And, indeed, Wittgenstein’s second sentence was “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”

Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

Samoyed

Samoyed courtesy↗︎︎ Harold Dixon

The problem with sentences is that it’s often unclear what they mean. Does “St. Trinian’s is a pretty little girls’ school” refer to a pretty school for little girls, or a fairly small school, or one for girls who are pretty and little?

Are these “little” girls young, or of modest stature? Is the “school” a building, a co-moving grouping (as of fish), or an intellectual lineage?1

We want our beliefs to be true, but if we don’t even know what they mean, we’re in trouble. A single sentence might be true in some sense, false in some other sense, and meaningless in a third. If you believe “St. Trinian’s↗︎︎ is a pretty little girls’ school,” what do you believe?

The meaning of a sentence depends on the meaning of its parts. The logical tradition attempted to find a fixed scheme for extracting sentence meaning from word meanings. Unfortunately, this is impossible.

In “the eggplant is a fruit,” probably what is meant is that all eggplants are fruits. In “the dog is a Samoyed,” probably what is meant is that some dog is a Samoyed. We can reasonably assume these meanings from our background understanding of their topics. This knowledge is nowhere in the sentence. The meaning depends on its parts—but not only on them.

This problem is pervasive. Linguists catalog many distinct ways a sentence can be ambiguous. On analysis, almost any sentence can be read with multiple meanings.

Rationalism↗︎︎’s diagnosis is that natural languages—English, Chinese, Tamil—are hopelessly broken. They are incapable of adequately expressing true beliefs. To be rational, we have to at least know what we’re talking about. Modern rationalism’s first major improvement on traditional logic replaced natural language sentences with mathematical formulae.

Let’s start with “the eggplant is a fruit” versus “the dog is a Samoyed.” The immediate problem is that nobody can explain what words like “the” and “is” mean.2 They caused trouble for logicians for millennia, until Gottlob Frege banned them.

Frege’s 1879 invention↗︎︎ of modern formal logic fixed several outstanding defects in traditional, Aristotelian logic:

  • He ditched natural language for a formal system that has compositional semantics: the meaning of a formula can be derived unambiguously from the meanings of its parts. It can’t be meaningless, and it can’t have more than one interpretation.3 That eliminated all problems of syntactic ambiguity, such as whether a little girls’ school is for little girls, or is little itself.
  • Frege was able to rigorously separate deduction from intuition, and to reject the latter. The distinction between the two had been somewhat nebulous in previous rationalist systems.
  • He solved several long-standing technical problems, in which Aristotelian logic gave outright wrong answers, by introducing a new device, “nested quantifiers.”

In Fregean epistemology, we can eliminate the ambiguity of “is”:

Formula Truth
∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruit(x) False
∃x dog(x) ∧ Samoyed(x) True

The symbol ∀ means “for all” and ⇒ means “implies.” So the first formula reads “For all things—let’s take an arbitrary example, and call it ‘x’—if that thing (named ‘x’) is an eggplant, it implies that it (‘x’) is also a fruit.” That’s what “the eggplant is a fruit” was supposed to mean.

∀ is called the universal quantifier, because it states a universal truth.

The symbol ∃ means “there is some” and ∧ means “and.” So the second formula reads “There is some thing—call it ‘x’—which is a dog, and is a Samoyed.” This captures the fact that, in this case, we are talking about a dog, not about dogs in general.

∃ is the existential quantifier, because it says something exists. The formula is not quite right as a translation of “the dog is a Samoyed,” however. That sentence is meant to be about the dog—this particular dog, whose identity should be clear in context. The logical formula only asserts that there exists some dog, somewhere, that is a Samoyed.

The meaning of “the dog,” taken out of context, is necessarily indeterminate: which dog it refers to depends on the situation.

If your dog is in the National Dog Registry↗︎︎, it has an ID number, like maybe 1514670. Then we can write, unambiguously,

Formula Truth
dog(dog1514670) ∧ Samoyed(dog1514670) True

In English: “dog #1514670 is a dog, and dog #1514670 is a Samoyed.”

But what if you see a dog, and it’s obviously a Samoyed, but you don’t know its registry number? What do you believe then?

This seemingly trivial question holds a key to meta-rationality↗︎︎! We will return to it repeatedly in The Eggplant.

On the meta-rational account, beliefs and reasoning are almost always context-dependent. There is no way to “fix” the belief “the dog is a Samoyed” to eliminate the context-dependence of “the.”

In Part Two, we’ll look in detail at how context-dependence works in reasonableness↗︎︎. In Part Three, we’ll see how rationality↗︎︎ partially eliminates context-dependence, in order to generalize understanding. However, that move separates rationality from concrete reality. Rationality has to depend on reasonableness to bridge the gap.

In Parts Four and Five, we’ll see how meta-rationality selectively integrates reasonableness and rationality to make both work better.

  • 1. This example originates in the grammar guide↗︎︎ for the artificial human language Loglan, which made predicate calculus (formal logic) speakable in order to eliminate ambiguity.
  • 2. During his impeachment proceedings, President Clinton explained↗︎︎ that his earlier testimony, to the effect that he had not had sex with Monica Lewinsky, was not perjury, because “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” The Articles of Impeachment declared that “President Clinton is guilty of what C.S. Lewis called ‘verbicide,’ murder of the plain spoken word. His attempt to invoke the literal truth defense fails under the reasonableness test.” We’ll discuss both “literal truth” and “reasonableness” a little later in this book.
  • 3. I’m skimming over exceptions here. Compositionality tries to guarantee that a logical formula can’t be more ambiguous, or less meaningful, than its parts. As we’ll see, its parts may themselves be ambiguous or meaningless. Also, it turned out that self-reference can make a formula meaningless even though all its parts are well-behaved.

The value of meaninglessness

G.W.F. Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Self-consciousness recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive; or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same, i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation.

—G. W. F. Hegel1

Do you believe that?

What would it even mean to believe that?2

Hegel’s version of Idealism dominated British philosophy for most of the 1800s:

Time and space are unreal, matter is an illusion, and the world consists of nothing but mind.3

Logical positivism began with the revelation, around 1900, that this was nonsense, and much of Hegel’s writing was incoherent gibberish.

With a sense of escaping from prison, we allowed ourselves to think that grass is green and that the sun and stars would exist if no one was aware of them.4

Aristotelian logic said that all statements were either true or false. This was the Law of the Excluded Middle↗︎︎: there is no third alternative.

Is Hegel’s statement above true or false? A century of philosophical effort was wasted trying to figure that out. Logical positivism cut the Gordian knot: it’s neither. It’s meaningless. The problem is not that we don’t know (an epistemic↗︎︎ problem), but that the world doesn’t work in a way that could answer the question (an ontological↗︎︎ problem).

Meaningless was a new truth value, added to the two traditional truth values true and false. This seemed a significant advance, enabling philosophers to declare that many traditional difficulties were meaningless pseudo-problems that should be forgotten.5

Adding meaningless to formal logic worked just fine, technically. For example, “either snow is white, OR colorless green ideas sleep furiously” gets the truth value true because “snow is white” is true, and it doesn’t matter that the other bit is meaningless. Likewise, “snow is white AND colorless green ideas sleep furiously” has truth value meaningless.

The logical positivists declared, further, that statements are meaningless just in case there is no way of finding out, in principle at least, whether they are true or false. This was due to their “positivist” conviction that rationality (including empiricism) is sufficient, in principle at least, to gain complete knowledge.

With a third truth value added, the door was open to add still more. Another was unknown: the belief status of sentences whose truth in the world you are uncertain about. Now logic could express epistemic uncertainty!

And we could add sortof as another truth value:

“Is Immanuel awake yet?”
“Well, sort of.”

A Hegelian might have these beliefs:

Sentence Believed
Snow is white True
Ravens are magenta False
Ludwig has fed the dog Unknown
Immanuel has woken from his slumber Sort of
Self-consciousness recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive; or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same, i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. True

But reality may be different:

Fact Truth
Snow is white Sort of
Ravens are magenta False
Ludwig has fed the dog True
Immanuel has woken from his slumber Sort of
Self-consciousness recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive; or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same, i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. Meaningless

This multi-valued↗︎︎ or non-Aristotelian logic solved some important problems in the early 20th century. It was widely adopted by philosophers, and entered popular consciousness as well. It became a mid-century shibboleth of open-minded intellectualism, and significantly influenced 1970s alternative spirituality.

It was, however, inadequate in practice, and was abandoned by philosophers around the same time it became popular among lay people.

It’s too coarse-grained. It’s rarely useful to hear merely that it’s “unknown” whether the dog has been fed; you want to know how confident to be, and why. If you are married to Hannah or Martin, learning that they are “sort of” having an affair may seem insufficient; you’d want to know some specifics.

Also, as we’ll see, hardly anything is “absolutely” true or false; at best they are “pretty much” true. So almost everything would get as its truth value either meaningless or sortof, if you took that seriously.

So multi-valued logic turned out to be a dead end, and is now mainly a historical curiosity.6

Multi-valued logic was replaced, in part, by probability theory. That gives a finer-grained account of the epistemological↗︎︎ problem of uncertainty, using numerical degrees of confidence. However, probability doesn’t deal with ontological↗︎︎ issues such as “meaningless” and “sort of true.” And, we’ll see that it has fatal flaws of its own, if it is misinterpreted as a general theory of epistemology.

Meta-rationality↗︎︎ requires a more sophisticated account of truth than any of these. It must do justice to cases like “is there any water in the refrigerator?”—the problem The Eggplant opened with. And, as we’ll see in the next chapter, cases like “that is true de jure but not de facto” and “that analysis is true as far as it goes.”

  • 1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Medieval and Modern Philosophy↗︎︎, p. 550. I’ve slightly simplified his sentence to remove context-dependence.
  • 2. Decades after logical positivism had failed, David Stove made fun of this particular Hegel quote in his rationalist manifesto, “What is Wrong with Our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo↗︎︎,” which is brilliant, savagely funny, and completely wrong. Definitely worth a read, or several, though! Stove understood that rationalism had failed, and how it failed, but not why it failed. To paraphrase: “Look, the logical positivists were right to reject metaphysics, to demand that all claims rest on unambiguous physical observations, and to insist on talking clearly enough that we know what we’re saying. I know it didn’t work, but there must be some way to fix it up!”
  • 3. This is logical positivist Bertrand Russell’s summary of Hegelian Idealism, not Hegel’s own statement.
  • 4. The quote is from G. E. Moore, one of the founders of logical positivism; in context, “we” refers specifically to Bertrand Russell—the foremost logical positivist—and himself.
  • 5. Some philosophers advocate applying this approach to the “present king of France” problem discussed in the previous chapter. The problem there seems to be different, though. Most people would agree that “the present king of France is bald” makes perfectly good sense, and isn’t meaningless in the way Hegel’s sentence seems to be. There is something wrong with it, but meaninglessness is not it.
  • 6. There are exceptions, for example in relational database systems. According to many but not all theorists, those should implement a three-valued formal logic, in which NULL↗︎︎ represents “unknown.” NULL is indeed commonly used to mean “unknown” in database software, although most systems do not completely consistently conform to three-valued epistemic logic.

The truth of the matter

Ostrich

Ostrich courtesy↗︎︎ Krzysztof Niewolny

Most true statements are not absolutely true. They may be true enough for all practical purposes; true in some sense; officially true, but effectively meaningless; true, other things being equal; true, as far as it goes; or true in theory, but not in practice.

Generically, we can call these sort-of truths.1 Sort-of truth causes trouble for most brands of rationalism↗︎︎. In particular, the formal methods underlying logicism and probabilism both depend on absolute truth.

The fundamental principle of logical deduction is that it is absolute-truth-preserving. If all the inputs to a deduction (its premises) are absolutely true, then so will be the outputs (its conclusions). All the power of formal logic flows from this property. If “All ravens are black” and “Huginn is a raven” are both absolutely true, then “Huginn is black” is also absolutely true.

Unfortunately, formal logic does not generally preserve sort-of truth. Sometimes it does: if “All ravens are black” is pretty much true, inasmuch as they are all very dark gray, then “Huginn is black” will also be pretty much true. But if “all ravens are black” is pretty much true inasmuch as most ravens are absolutely black but a few are magenta, then “Huginn is black” might be entirely false. Sort-of truths don’t follow the standard rules of logical inference.

Could some other, more complicated logical rules work effectively with sort-of truths? The previous chapter contemplated adding the new truth value “sort of” to logic. This works formally, but doesn’t do much in practice. You can’t infer anything useful. As we saw, if you know that “all ravens are black” is sort-of true, you can’t conclude anything about specific ravens. And if “Huginn is black” is sort-of-true, it is also sort-of-false. You’d want to know in what sense is it true, and in what sense false.

“Sort of true” is not, in itself, sufficiently specific. There are many varieties of sort-of truths. It is true, by and large, that you can sit on chairs; and it is technically true that eggplants are berries.2 So, could we add these as additional truth values, and define inference rules for them?

It’s hard to see how that would work. Let’s try an example… If it’s officially but not actually true that ostrich licenses are issued for a term of two years (the local authority usually revokes them after a few months), and it’s more or less true that Antonia has just got an ostrich license (she applied for it under her late sister’s name to avoid a tax), how true is it that her license is valid for two years? This isn’t a logical question; it’s a practical and/or legal one. A correct answer depends on extensive, unstated knowledge of bureaucratic procedure. In practice, no one has succeeded in making a usable logic with values like “officially true” or “basically false.”

Unlike logicism, probabilism doesn’t require an absolute belief about what the truth of a statement is. However, it does require that any statement actually is either absolutely true or absolutely false. Suppose you want to know if there is any water in the refrigerator. To eliminate uncertainty, you look inside, and there appears to be only an eggplant. Now, is there water in the refrigerator? Well, with probability nearly 1.0, it’s sort of true that there is (in the cells of the eggplant).3 And with probability nearly 1.0, it’s sort of false (you were thirsty and there’s nothing to drink). It’s a rock-bottom principle of the mathematics that the probability of a statement being true and the probability of it being false have to add up to 1.0. (This is a different way of stating the Law of the Excluded Middle↗︎︎.) Here the probabilities of sort-of truth and sort-of falsity add up to nearly 2.0, which is uninterpretable as a probability. The math doesn’t work for sort-of truths.

For most rationalisms, these difficulties are sufficient reason to reject sort-of truths. Meaningful statements must be absolutely true or false—universally, objectively, independent of circumstances, purposes, or judgements—even if we don’t know whether they are true or false. (Then there is only epistemic↗︎︎ uncertainty, and no ontological↗︎︎ nebulosity↗︎︎.) However, outside of mathematics and maybe fundamental physics, there are few truths like that. The world of eggplant-sized objects just doesn’t work that way.

It’s not that rationalism couldn’t be true, in the abstract. It might work very well in some sort of world. Just not the one we live in. What sort of world? It would help a lot if all truths and falsities were absolute.

We want to know things about cottage cheese and dance moves and puppy training—but nothing is absolutely true about them. Obviously, all sorts of things are true about them, in a common sense way. But we can’t even say definitely whether or not something is cottage cheese. There are always marginal cases, like cottage cheese that has been in the refrigerator too long and is gradually turning into something else. Nor is it absolutely true that cottage cheese is white. That is only “more-or-less true”; examined closely, it’s slightly yellowish.

Somewhat less obviously, absolute truths are rare even in the professional practice of rational, technical disciplines. Moreover, this is rarely a problem. Mostly-true truths are usually good enough, and we routinely reason with them effectively.

  • The Don’t Repeat Yourself↗︎︎ principle is mainly true in software development.
  • Medicinal chemists know to avoid molecules above 500 daltons↗︎︎, because it is mostly true that they are too big to be “druggable.”
  • Probability theory is often useful in practice, even though (as we’ll see later) the scarcity of absolute truths and the ubiquity of unknown unknowns make it almost never officially applicable.

One way we make rationality work is by making mostly-true truths even more true, by engineering regularities into materials, objects, processes, and social structures.

Quixotic quests for absolute truth

Holy Grail

Encountering a sort-of truth, rationalists often say “there must be an absolute truth somewhere in the vicinity; we should find and use that instead.” I’ll describe four strategies for converting sort-of truths into absolute ones: here briefly, and in detail in later chapters.

Each of the four methods works in some cases. Indeed, these moves are all meta-rational↗︎︎: they are methods of ontological remodeling↗︎︎, intended to make rationality work better. Unfortunately for rationalism, they provide no general solution, either individually or in combination. Commonly, none of them can generate absolute truths that are usable in practice.

Also, they are often impractically expensive when they do work. Locating an absolute truth may be difficult; the true statement may be unreasonably complicated; using it in practical inference may prove intractable. As a practical matter, you have to weigh the potential value of absolute truth, for enabling truth-preserving formal inference, against these costs.

As discussed earlier, rationalism tends to misinterpret↗︎︎ nebulosity↗︎︎ as linguistic vagueness or as epistemic uncertainty. The first two strategies for producing absolute truths correspond to these two misinterpretations; the third and fourth tackle the underlying ontological problem.

Treating the problem as one of linguistic vagueness, the first strategy tries to define all the terms in a statement with absolute precision, so that it becomes absolutely true or false. This proceeds in two steps.

  • First, you move the nebulosity inside the statement. If it’s more-or-less true that cottage cheese is white, then perhaps it’s absolutely true that cottage cheese is more-or-less white. But this by itself doesn’t help with deduction. It’s not clear what “more-or-less white” means, or what you can legitimately infer from it. Also, even though it is more-or-less true that cottage cheese is white, it’s not absolutely true that cottage cheese is more-or-less white. If you mix blue food coloring into cottage cheese, it’s not white at all, but it remains more-or-less cottage cheese.

  • So a second step typically requires splitting the meaning of the terms into technical special cases that are defined differently. For example, one might define exactly the range of reflective properties that count as a particular kind of whiteness specialized for cottage cheese. And one might define exactly the range of substances that count as cottage cheese, deliberately excluding some that mere laypeople, who are not professional cottage cheese definers, would ordinarily accept (such as mixtures with food coloring). The next chapter of the book, “Are eggplants fruits?”, discusses this strategy.

Alternatively, treating the problem as one of epistemic uncertainty, the second strategy reinterprets the mostly-true statement “all ravens are black” as an absolutely true statement that “the probability that a raven is black is high.” This sometimes works well: when variation is genuinely random and the entities involved are otherwise uniform, so a general statement is adequate.

But in individual one-off cases, you usually want to know why exceptions occur; variations are patterned and meaningful. “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and the chemist’s 500-dalton rule of thumb are not “true with a given probability.” Every bit of code and every potential drug is meaningfully unique, and individual exceptions to the rules have to make specific sense in context.

If you observe that “Alain is bald” is pretty much true, that is not equivalent to “Alain is bald with high probability.” It’s about your friend Alain, not people in general. It’s not that you have imperfect certainty about whether or not he is bald. You know how bald he is; the issue is that he’s not altogether bald. The chapter “When will you go bald?” discusses this further.

Just how bald is Alain? Can we put a number on it? Then we could get absolute truths about whether some people are bald or not, and absolute truths about the degree of baldness in marginal cases. Maybe “Alain is 73.84261% bald” is absolutely true. Or maybe truth itself a matter of numerical degree, so “Alain is bald” is 0.7384261 true. “When will you go bald?” discusses these ontological strategies (numbers three and four) too. They may work when nebulosity is a matter of “shades of gray.” Most nebulosity doesn’t work that way, though.

As you may already agree, none of the four strategies is individually adequate to absolutize all cases of sort-of truth. But maybe there are just four different forms of nebulosity, so every sort-of truth could be handled by one of them? Or if a handful of additional methods were added? I think that, after reading on, you will find this unlikely. Proving that as an in-principle, philosophical point is not part of the program here, though.

Rather, in the actual practice of technical rationality, absolutizing sort-of truths is not generally necessary, or even common. An adequate account of rationality needs to explain how this can be.

Part Three of The Eggplant is about that. How do we reason formally without the absolute truths that formal reasoning methods formally require?

Rationality treats selected sort-of truths as if they were absolutely true. How can we get away with this deceitful fantasy? Some rational inferences turn out to be reasonably true. That is, they count as true enough under reasonable↗︎︎ (non-rational) interpretation in a specific context.

For this to work, we have to choose carefully which sort-of truths we will treat as absolutely true. We have to know, or reason about, which formal inferences we can get away with—even though, starting from only-sort-of truths, they are not logically sound. We have to know, or reason about, how to translate our formal conclusions back into sort-of truths, and into reasonable actions. All these are central meta-rational↗︎︎ considerations.

  • 1. The term “partial truth” is more common in philosophy. For an in-depth discussion, I recommend Elijah Millgram’s Hard Truths↗︎︎. He takes much the same positions I do here, and discusses the issues in much greater detail, with many fun examples.
  • 2. “In botany, a berry is a fleshy fruit without a stone produced from a single flower containing one ovary. Berries so defined include grapes, currants, and tomatoes, as well as cucumbers, eggplants (aubergines) and bananas, but exclude certain fruits commonly called berries, such as strawberries and raspberries.”—Wikipedia↗︎︎. Who knew?
  • 3. Probabilists insist that no belief should have probability 1.0. There’s always the possibility that what you saw wasn’t a real eggplant, but a plastic imitation.

Reductio ad reductionem

Atomic force microscopy image

Atomic force microscope image of a single molecule, courtesy↗︎︎ Bruno Schuler

Reduction is a powertool of rationality. It accounts for some of the most spectacular scientific success stories. Outstanding examples include the kinetic theory of gases, set theory, and the whole of computer science.1

Dazzled by such cases, some rationalists say we can do this for everything. Overall, rationalism seeks a rational theory of rationality↗︎︎, preferably based on a criterion which guarantees correctness. Could reduction form that criterion? Reduction certainly is rational, so reducing rationality to reduction would fulfill the rationalist program. On this view, if a theory is not reductive, it is not rational.

The dream is that reduction could deliver absolute truths about the eggplant-sized world, by explanation through a series of levels. The rationalist’s reflex, when confronted with nebulosity↗︎︎, is to retreat to the most fundamental physics: quantum field theory. That, she says, is definitely not nebulous; there is absolute truth there.2 Based on this unshakable foundation, we can find absolute truths about atoms, which are just assemblages of quanta. And we can reduce molecules to atoms (chemistry), and cells to molecules (molecular biology), and eggplants to cells (phytotomy); and finally, triumphantly, prove beyond any possibility of doubt the absolute truth that eggplants are fruits (reproductive biology).

Empirically, this metaphysical fantasy is a bad theory of actually-existing rationality. It’s simply false to facts.

We are routinely rational, in practice, in domains in which reduction is not currently feasible. Neuroscience is mostly not, in practice, reducible to molecular biology. We don’t have sufficiently detailed and accurate models of neurons to make that feasible. Psychology is not, in practice, reducible to neuroscience. We don’t understand in detail what individual neurons do, and we don’t know in detail how groups of neurons form functional structures. Cases of completely successful scientific reductions, in which one domain has been fully explained in terms of another, are very rare, and perhaps non-existent.3 Partial reductions do not enable absolute truth to bubble up from lower to higher levels.

When you point this out, rationalists often fall back on “well, reduction must be possible in principle.” If this metaphysical claim were true,4 it would be irrelevant. A useful understanding of rationality needs to explain how it does work in practice, not how it should work according to philosophical theory, or could work in a distant, ideal future.

“Sometimes this way of reasoning wins big” does not imply “this is the only way to do it,” nor “it always works.”5 A good theory of rationality may treat reduction among other topics. As it happens, The Eggplant’s alternative treatment of rationality doesn’t. “What role does reduction play in rationality?” is a valid and interesting question, but it’s not central enough to give space in this book.

For much of the twentieth century, most philosophers of science did believe reduction was essential to science, or even its essence. They developed several complex, conflicting stories about what reduction is and how and why it works, including taxonomies of different types of reduction. Unfortunately, none of these theories survived testing against diverse specific cases of scientific progress. In this century, most philosophers have reluctantly accepted that reduction is nebulous (impossible to define), and that most science is not reductive.6

Whether or not reduction is theoretically possible is irrelevant to whether reductionism is a useful theory of rationality. However, it’s helpful to understand some obstacles to reduction that arise in practice. You may then suspect that they are also obstacles in principle as well. I’ll sketch two issues here:

  1. The terms used at one level of description cannot be defined in terms of the next lower level, as required.
  2. Levels of description have patchy holes in them, so lower levels show through, and higher levels get sucked in.

These could be summarized as: nebulosity blurs reduction, so it cannot propagate absolute truth upward.

Definition

Reduction should redefine entities at one abstraction level in terms of combinations of those at the next lower one. These definitions must be precise to propagate absolute truth. In physics, this may be possible. Atoms are combinations of electrons and nucleons. Light spectra are combinations of photons of different wavelengths.

In biology, reduction is mainly impossible in practice.7 In fact, it’s usually impossible to define biological entities at all; certainly not precisely, or in terms of chemistry. Cells, for example, are a central category, but there’s no definite criterion for what counts as a cell. If you attempt to find one, you rapidly bog down in a maze of exceptions. You might start with something like “a self-reproducing living unit carrying a single copy of the organism’s DNA within a membrane.” But red blood cells don’t self-reproduce and have no DNA. Mitochondria are not cells, but they self-reproduce using their own DNA within a membrane. Muscle cells have multiple nuclei, each with a separate complete copy of the DNA. Some algae have life stages in which they have no cell membranes. And so on indefinitely.8

The next chapter explores many reasons absolutely precise definitions are difficult or impossible, particularly in biology.

In most cases, translating terms from one level of description to a lower one would be meaningless and useless even if it were possible. Imagine you had a precise chemical definition of “cell.” Start with some particular cell, and imagine randomly adding or removing individual molecules. (There are several trillion of them per cell, mostly water; on the order of a hundred million proteins and a billion lipid molecules.) At some point, a single-molecule change must switch the entity from a cell to a non-cell. What could that possibly signify? (It wouldn’t be the transition from living to dead, even if “living” were definable and single molecule made the difference; a dead cell is a cell. It wouldn’t be the transition from able to reproduce to not able; red blood cells can’t reproduce regardless. And so on.)

Some rationalists might say that if biologists can’t define “cell,” they are sciencing wrong. If “cell” isn’t reducible to quantum theory, at least in principle, nothing biologists say about cells can be absolutely true or false, and therefore it’s all meaningless. Biology will have to get fixed by people who know what they are doing. Scientists can only meaningfully ask questions that can be cashed out in unambiguous physical terms.

But, this is impossible currently. So then, rationally speaking, we do not currently have any genuine knowlege of biology. Here there is a fork in the road… Taking this seriously leads to post-rationalist nihilism, the despairing realization that rationality cannot deliver on rationalism’s promises. By rationalism’s standards, knowlege is mostly impossible. We’ll explore this nihilism, and ways to avoid the rage and depression it entails, at the end of Part One.

Alternatively, you can acknowledge that actually-existing biological research is rational, and so some different and better understanding of rationality must be possible. Meta-rationalism↗︎︎ is that.

Levels of description are nebulous

The levels proposed by reductionism were not ordained by God, nor granted perfect cohesion by Him. Apart from fundamental physics, they all turn out to be layers of patchy clouds. In computer science terms, they are “leaky abstractions↗︎︎,” that fail to fully “encapsulate” lower levels, which show through.

Level-skipping is common. Some properties “show through” all the way from quantum field theory to the eggplant-sized world. Color is an example. Starting around 1800, chemistry restricted itself to investigating properties of molecules that can be derived from the atoms that make them up. But you can’t derive most properties of molecules—including color—from their constituent atoms, so color was explicitly excluded from chemistry’s consideration.

Starting in the mid-20th century, color became a chemical property again, due to the development of quantum molecular orbital theory↗︎︎. That considers the relationship of individual electrons to the whole molecule. In a molecule, electrons are “delocalized,” so only global computations over the whole system, at the quantum level, give meaningful results.9 Quantum mechanics “shows through” the atomic abstraction. In the case of color, it is still feasible to make approximate but predictive level-skipping calculations.

On the other hand, chemical reactions cannot generally be predicted just from molecular orbital theory, because that considers molecules in a vacuum. Most reactions occur in an environment—such as water—that modulates reactivity. In biochemistry, taking this a step further, many reactions are only enabled by the active site of an enzyme, which provides the exquisitely specific spatial distribution of electron density required. Enzyme function is often regulated by additional molecules—activators and inhibitors—that alter this geometry. Those are often regulated in turn by complex cellular processes, ultimately under control of genetic feedback loops.

And it doesn’t stop there; the metabolism of individual cells is regulated by signals from neighboring cells, and up through to the organization of the whole organism, which interacts with its environment, which… which means that a fully predictive model of an individual biochemical reaction would suck in all the descriptive levels above it, as well as below it, and therefore would require a quantum simulation of the entire organism and its environment. As a matter of metaphysics, this may be possible in principle, but it has no implications for any conceivable practice.

  • 1. The kinetic theory explains the relationship between the pressure, volume, and temperature of eggplant-sized quantities of gas in terms of the behavior of individual gas molecules. It’s only approximately true, but highly accurate in practice. Set theory reduces all of mathematics to a handful of simple axioms about a single type of object. Computer software generally comes in many layers, each providing a different abstract vocabulary that is implemented in terms of the next one down in the stack. Eventually you reach a machine language program, which is directly executed by the hardware. That, in turn, is understood as many layers of abstraction, with registers and multipliers implemented as gates, implemented as circuits, implemented as a physical chip that is understood partly in terms of quantum mechanics. Each layer in this stack is fully explained by reduction to the one below. Until you get to the semiconductor device level, anyway. Transistors are modeled partly with quantum mechanics, but the reduction is incomplete, and involves empirically derived parameters of bulk materials. Complete quantum mechanical reduction is not feasible there.
  • 2. Even this point is dubious. It’s unlikely there’s any absolute truth in actually-existing fundamental physics, at least. Half a century ago, it seemed that the Standard Model and general relativity were absolute truths, but since then anomalies have piled up. The reflex to treat physics as certain is left over from the Newtonian worldview. Taking actually-existing physical theory (rather than a fantasy of an ultimate correct one) as absolute doesn’t work anymore; but it’s a cultural habit ingrained in many rationalists.
  • 3. For an argument that there are zero examples of completely successful scientific reductions, with a recognition that imperfect reductions are important nevertheless, see Kenneth F. Schaffner’s “Reduction: the Cheshire cat problem and a return to roots↗︎︎,” Synthese (2006) 151: 377–402. A classic argument against reductionism is “More Is Different↗︎︎” by physicist Philip W. Anderson, who made the case that small molecules, and even large atomic nuclei, cannot be understood quantum mechanically. Science, 177:4047 (Aug. 4, 1972), pp. 393-396.
  • 4. Certainty that reduction is possible in principle seems to be proven by proceeding backwards, in steps of emotional necessity. There must exist a way to gain reliable knowledge, or else the universe would be ultimately awful, and we might as well kill ourselves. Rationality is, by definition, the only way to gain reliable knowledge; so rationality must always work. Rationality requires absolute truth; therefore absolute truths must always exist. Fundamental physics has absolute truths; if theory A is absolutely true and we can reduce theory B to theory A, then theory B is also absolutely true; so we must be able to reduce everything to fundamental physics. QED.
  • 5. There’s a tendency among working scientists to confuse mechanistic understanding (which is widely available) with theory level reduction (which is not). Reduction is not just any explanation, or causal explanation, or mechanical explanation. We also have no coherent definition or specific theory of what an explanation or cause is, so if it were just those things, “reduction” wouldn’t explain anything, and wouldn’t be an adequate account of rationality.
  • 6. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s “Scientific Reduction↗︎︎” article is a good review.
  • 7. See Schaffner’s “Reduction” paper cited above. He also explains, with nice examples, how good biological explanations typically include aspects from many levels of description, rather than reducing one level (even in part) to the next-lower one.
  • 8. Sharrock, Randall, and Greiffenhagen’s 2011 “Engineering the Scientific Corpus: Routine Semantic Work in (Re)constructing a Biological Ontology↗︎︎” describes a team of experts in biological ontology attempting to find a definition for “cell” and failing; and then attempting to find a coherent taxonomy of types of cells, and achieving only limited, provisional, negotiated success.
  • 9. Taking this to 11, quantum mechanics predicts that gold would have almost the same color as silver. Gold’s yellow depends on its electrons increasing in mass due to traveling at more than half light speed, and its color can only be predicted from a combination of quantum mechanics and relativity.

Are eggplants fruits?

Various eggplants and relatives

Diverse gbomas and brinjals, courtesy↗︎︎ GlobalHort. Are they eggplants?

“Fruits are tasty.” Do you believe that, or not?

Well… it’s pretty clearly neither true nor false, so maybe it’s meaningless, as logical positivism recommended? It does seem to have some tenuous meaning… The problem is not so much that it’s meaningless as that it’s extremely indefinite. Which things count as “fruits”? Do you mean to include eggplants—technically berries—as fruits? Does “tasty” mean “tastes good” or “has some taste, not none?” (Is anything absolutely tasteless?) Tastes good according to whose liking? Does “are” imply “every single one,” or “generally speaking, but with some exceptions”?

This is an extreme case, but all ordinary statements about eggplant-sized phenomena are also indefinite to some degree. What even counts as an eggplant? How about the various species of technically-eggplants that look and taste nothing like what you think of as one?1 Is a diced eggplant cooked with ground beef and tomato sauce still an eggplant? At exactly what point does a rotting eggplant cease to be an eggplant, and turn into “mush,” a different sort of thing? Are the inedible green sepals that are usually attached to the purple part of an eggplant in a supermarket—the “end cap,” we might say—also part of the eggplant? Where does an unpicked eggplant begin, and the eggplant bush it grows from end?

These are not questions with definite answers. Nor are they matters we are uncertain about; it is not that there are objectively correct answers that we haven’t yet scientifically determined. They are matters of definition—or, more accurately, of indefiniteness.

This is awkward for rationalist↗︎︎ epistemologies↗︎︎. What does it mean to believe that eggplants are fruits if you can’t even say what an eggplant or a fruit is? What would it mean for the belief to be true or false?

Earlier I asked “What sort of world would rationalism be true of?” It would be made of ontologically definite objects, categories, properties, and relationships. This is explicit in some rationalisms, notably logicism. It’s implicit in others. For example, most versions of probabilism quietly pass over the issue, but can’t work without ontologically definite beliefs, preferences, actions, and outcomes.

Ontologically↗︎︎ definite objects are ones that something could be true or false about, without any wishy-washiness.

  • There is a truth about which ontologically definite object something is, so either two are the same one, or different ones.
  • There is a truth about whether some bit of matter is part of a definite object, or not.
  • A definite object either is, or is not, a member of a definite category.
  • An ontologically definite object has definite properties. They could be absolute (“is red”) or parameterized (“is 72% red”). What they can’t be is vague (“well, reddish I suppose”).
  • Definite objects either do, or do not, stand in definite relationships with each other. The cat is on the mat, or it’s not.

Rationalism’s impulse, encountering an indefinite statement, is to try to rephrase it in ontologically definite terms. It seeks a fully-specified technical definition for what each word means, splitting it into many different well-defined categories if necessary. Are eggplants fruits? Yes and no. Wearing your chef’s hat, no, they would make a lousy dessert; wearing your botanist’s hat, yes, they are the seed-bearing structure of an angiosperm.

Rationalism’s diagnosis, again, is that natural language is defective. We’ll have to replace it with something precise: formal logic, for instance.2

Formal logic fixed the problem with “is,” but ∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruit(x) does not help with the ambiguity of “fruit.” More generally, formal logic dealt with syntactic ambiguity, but did not directly address the semantic ambiguity hidden inside predicates. (“Predicates” are words in a logical formula that represent categories, properties, and relationships, such as “eggplant,” “purple,” and “bigger.”)

Nevertheless, logic helps. A first step is to make explicit which meaning of “fruit” is used in the belief:

Formula Believed
∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruitbotanical(x) True
∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruitculinary(x) False
∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ ¬ fruitculinary(x) True

The symbol ¬ means “not,” so you believe that every eggplant is a fruit in the botanical sense, and that every eggplant is not a fruit in the culinary one.

The second step is to give “necessary and sufficient conditions” in logic to define the terms. We want to say something like:

fruitbotanical(x) ≝ seed_bearing(x) ∧ structure(x) ∧ (∃y angiosperm(y) ∧ part_of(x,y))

That is: “a thing x is defined to be a botanical fruit if, and only if, it is a seed-bearing structure and there is some angiosperm y that x is part of.”

We have had more than a century of experience with this, and it has not gone well.3 Several patterns of difficulty emerge from serious attempts:

  • You typically discover a never-ending variety of weird exceptions, complications, and borderline cases. Is a glass bottle of poppy seeds “seed-bearing”? What is not a “structure”? Is a seedless banana a fruit?4 Is an eggplant still “part of an angiosperm” after it has been picked? (Does an entire object count as part of itself?) And what about the problems already encountered with cooked eggplants, rotting ones, and so forth?

  • The attempt often bogs down in taxonomizing an unbounded proliferation of “different senses,” which—as you repeatedly split them to deal with special cases—come to seem increasingly contrived, convoluted, and ad hoc. Dictionaries I consulted gave dozens of different definitions of “fruit,” with complicated relationships among them, all of them problematic in some way. “The developed ovary of a seed plant with its contents and accessory parts”: how developed does it have to be to count as a fruit? Which parts count as “accessories”? And “fruit” is quite well-behaved, as words go. The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes 645 senses of “run.”

  • You find yourself trying to make one nebulous↗︎︎ category (“fruit”) precise in terms of several others (such as “part”), which also turn out to be nebulous. Then you need to define those. You might think that eventually this process would terminate, that you would have covered the space of categories, that it would ground out in something solid; but in practice this never happens. The set of terms proliferates exponentially, and apparently endlessly. It is not bounded by the size of a dictionary, due to the repeated fragmentation of “senses.”

  • The definition itself expands into an enormous formula that seems so unwieldy as to be uninterpretable and unusable in practice.

Later I will suggest reasons these particular patterns of trouble arise.

The lesson is not so much that it is definitely impossible ever to make perfectly accurate definitions (although that seems to be true). It’s that we do not in fact have perfect definitions, yet this is rarely a problem in the routine practice of science and engineering. We would need perfect clarity only if we needed absolute truth, but we don’t.

Genes are interesting to geneticists, but what counts as one is notoriously impossible to define.5 A software engineer may explain a system as “more-or-less a model-view-controller↗︎︎ architecture.” “More-or-less” might mean that there isn’t a completely strict separation between the view and the controller. What counts as an MVC architecture is not precisely defined, but the category is central in current web development practice anyway.

Increasing precision is often useful, or even critical, in technical practice. Indeed, sharpening terms is a form of ontological remodeling, an operation central to meta-rationality↗︎︎. It’s just that it’s rarely possible to drive the process to completion in order to locate something capable of being absolutely true or false.

The imprecision of natural language has at least two different aspects. There’s ambiguity: one word with several meanings. That’s not the culprit here: we subscripted different senses of “fruit,” but it didn’t solve the problem. You can subdivide senses as finely as you like, and still not gain perfect precision. This other issue is that individual senses remain resistant to definition.

Replacing natural language with a precise mathematical formalism—logic—doesn’t solve this second problem. The issue is not with language, it is with the categories that terms refer to. The difficulty is not that we can’t get a statement to refer to the right category. It is that there is no sharp dividing line in the world that reliably does the work we want.

The problem is in the territory, not in the map. It’s an ontological issue, not a representational one. We want terms to “carve nature at its joints,” but the eggplant-sized world has no joints.6 There is no natural, intrinsic, absolute distinction between eggplants and non-eggplants; nor can any specialized or technical subdivision of the category fully fix that. We’ll explore reasons in several of the following chapters. We’ll also look at some other failed rationalist attempts to solve the problem.

Language is not the problem, but it is the solution. How much trouble does the imprecision of language cause, in practice? Rarely enough to notice—so how come? We have many true beliefs about eggplant-sized phenomena, and we successfully express them in language—how?

These are aspects of reasonableness↗︎︎ that we’ll explore in Part Two. The function of language is not to express absolute truths. Usually, it is to get practical work done in a particular context. Statements are interpreted in specific situations, relative to specific purposes. Rather than trying to specify the exact boundaries of all the variants of a category for all time, we deal with particular cases as they come up. We use resources available in the context to make good-enough distinctions for action. In Part Three, we’ll see how rationality relies on reasonableness to do that job.

Categorization serves practical purposes, so the underlying issue is not “is this absolutely and objectively an eggplant” but “can I make a decent moussaka from it?” Whether something counts as an eggplant (if it’s been in the refrigerator rather a long time) may depend on how badly you want moussaka. This is a main reason attempts at objective definition fail.7

This also explains the explosion of definitional “senses”: they are attempts to specify in advance, in full generality, what will count as a member of the category in different contexts and for different purposes. Contexts and purposes are unenumerable, so this is impossible. In fact, we’ll see later that almost any word can mean almost anything, in some unusual context. This implies that analyzing words as having some enumerable set of “senses” can’t work.

  • 1. There are three or so species of eggplant—authorities disagree on how many—and the category is polyphyletic. (That is, different eggplant species are less closely related to each other than they are to non-eggplants.) Solanum aethiopicum↗︎︎, the Ethiopian eggplant, probably the same species as the Scarlet eggplant↗︎︎, looks very much like an heirloom tomato. Solanum macrocarpon↗︎︎, the African eggplant or gboma, is commonly eaten but intensely bitter, and dangerously toxic if you over-indulge. For more fascinating facts, read Doganlar et al., “↗︎︎,” GENETICS 161:4 (2002) pp. 1697-1711.
  • 2. Formal logic is unattractive in many ways, so we might prefer an alternative. From the 1960s through the 1980s, artificial intelligence researchers attempted to devise better “knowledge representation languages.” By 1990 it became apparent that all were either equivalent to logic—mere “notational variants”—or so technically flawed as to be unusable. There doesn’t seem to be anything that can do the job better.
  • 3. The problem of intractable indefiniteness, and its solution, have been discovered repeatedly in many different fields, among them the philosophy of science, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Terry Winograd’s “Moving the semantic fulcrum↗︎︎” cites and summarizes the literature as of 1985. He discusses particularly John Searle’s “Literal Meaning↗︎︎,” which works through some entertainingly ridiculous examples. (Erkenntnis 13 (1978) pp. 207-224.) Searle attempts to find something in the vicinity of “the cat is on the mat” that could be absolutely true, and fails. His conclusion, and Winograd’s, is that meanings are unavoidably context-dependent. We’ll explore that same answer in Part Two of The Eggplant. A fine recent discussion is Michael Huemer’s “The Failure of Analysis and the Nature of Concepts,” pp. 51–76 in Chris Daly, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods↗︎︎, 2015. I don’t fully agree with his conclusions, but he explains several problems clearly.
  • 4. “The term ‘seedless fruit’ is biologically somewhat contradictory, since fruits are usually defined botanically as mature ovaries containing seeds.”—Wikipedia↗︎︎.
  • 5. See, for instance, Portin and Wilkins, “The Evolving Definition of the Term ‘Gene’↗︎︎,” GENETICS 205:4 (2017) pp. 1353-1364. James Watson’s The Double Helix↗︎︎ says that he intended the paper announcing the discovery of the structure of DNA to begin “Genes are interesting to geneticists.”
  • 6. In philosophy, categories in the world that are absolute, intrinsic, or objective are called “natural kinds.” Pretty much the only available examples of natural kinds of eggplant-sized objects were biological species. Philosophers have reluctantly more-or-less accepted the recent factual discovery that species are necessarily nebulous, and that this makes the “natural kind” concept obsolete. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Natural Kinds↗︎︎.” Plato was first to use the phrase “cut nature at the joints.” It’s closely related to his Theory of Forms↗︎︎, which I consider the worst of philosophical disasters.
  • 7. Whether something is an eggplant is not subjective either, of course. The planet Pluto is not an eggplant, despite some superficial similarities.

When will you go bald?

Bald guy

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Tania Mousinho

Anti-rationalist: You rationalists just think in black and white. The world is shades of gray!

Rationalist: Yeah, we got this. A gray surface reflects some proportion of the incoming light, varying from none (0.0), corresponding to pure black, continuously to all the light (1.0), corresponding to pure white. Gray is any value in between. It’s just a number. You know… we rationalists can do numbers!

Both have valid points here. “Shades of gray” may be trying to point at nebulosity↗︎︎, and sort-of truths, which do cause fatal problems for rationalism. But quantitative variation does not, or not always.

Recall the possibility that “Alain is bald” is pretty much true, but not altogether so. Or maybe we can say that “Alain is pretty much bald,” but that doesn’t really help. The difficulty for rationalist↗︎︎ epistemology↗︎︎ is in dealing with borderline cases. What counts as evidence for Alain being actually, versus pretty much, bald? Someone can certainly have some head hairs while counting as unambiguously bald. If you believe that Alain definitely is bald, what exactly is it that you are believing?

Analytic metaphysicians and semanticists—two species of rationalists—have devised several technical approaches to answering these questions. They typically apply that analysis to baldness and a small, standard set of other examples of graded properties: mainly, colors. A particular apple is basically red, but an orangish red; is it a red apple? They call this problem “vagueness.”

I’ll review briefly some of the attempted solutions, along with some reasons they don’t seem to work. I won’t go into detail, because it is generally acknowledged that none of them are satisfactory, although defenders have added complications to deal with some objections.1

More importantly, none of the approaches would address nebulosity effectively even if they worked technically in the terms in which they were conceived. Nebulosity is not mostly about “vagueness” as understood in this literature—that is, matters of degree rather than kind. In fact, we’ll see that even rationalists’ standard examples turn out not to work that way. So the problem is mis-framed, and must be thought about quite differently. I’ll come back to that at the end of this chapter.

Following the usual pattern, some rationalist approaches mischaracterize the ontological↗︎︎ problem as epistemological↗︎︎, and some as linguistic.

An epistemological approach holds that there is an objective fact about how many hairs you can have and not be bald. Maybe it is 438. If you have 438 hairs, it is still false that you are bald. But the moment will come when one drops out, and you have only 437 left. Then it will be an absolute, objective, cosmically true fact that you are bald. The apparent nebulosity of baldness is really an epistemic problem: no one knows exactly what the true cutoff value is. So when we say “Alain is pretty much bald” we mean that he’s close to our estimate of the cutoff value, but aren’t sure if he’s a bit under or a bit over.

Sentence Belief strength Truth
Alain is bald 0.7384261 True

The advantage of this approach is that you can use ordinary logic (just-plain-true-and-false) when you are certain, and the well-behaved mathematics of probability for cases that are unclear.

The disadvantage is that it is silly. You can try hard, but you can’t seriously believe that adding or subtracting one hair makes a qualitative difference.

So an alternative approach misinterprets the ontological problem as a linguistic one. Semanticists are generally committed to the project of the previous chapter: finding ways to define the words of ordinary language using formal logic or something like it. Vague words have been a big problem for them, and it’s gradually become clear that most words are somewhat vague. Attempted solutions are highly technical and mostly involve non-standard extensions to formal logic.2 It’s hard to imagine that they correspond to how ordinary people think. Some semanticists find that embarrassing; others consider “how people think” to be a job for psychologists instead, so it’s not their problem.

A mainstream rationalist, an engineer perhaps, is also likely to take a linguistic approach. But whereas semanticists want to find the “real↗︎︎” meanings of vague words, an engineer might reject them instead:

Look, the objective truth is clear: this guy has some number of hairs. How many would count as “bald” is subjective and meaningless. It’s just an opinion, like whether Coldplay suck or are the greatest band ever. Words aren’t reality. If you want to know anything, you measure something and use math.

Will Champion

Will Champion, courtesy↗︎︎ Raph_PH

But if you look at a picture of Coldplay’s drummer, Will Champion, you instantly see that he’s pretty well bald, although he still has quite a few hairs on the sides and back. How many hairs? I don’t have even an approximate belief about that. I couldn’t guess to within a factor of ten. Would counting them change anyone’s judgement about whether he’s bald? No.

It would seem that one can know whether or not someone is bald, and that in many cases there is indeed a truth of the matter, and that any workable epistemology has to acknowledge this. But maybe that is a delusion; should we bite the bullet and declare all vague terms defective, so a rational epistemology should simply ignore them?

The problem is that (as the previous chapter explained) nearly everything we think we know about eggplant-sized phenomena, we can only state in vague terms. Eggplants have few interesting mathematical or physical properties. Their biological and culinary properties, the ones that matter, are nebulous. Denying that we can have rational beliefs about eggplant-sized phenomena would limit rationality to physics and maybe chemistry. Some rationalists do back themselves into this position, but most feel it concedes too much.

A third class of approaches bites a different bullet, by admitting that the problem is ontological, not epistemological or linguistic. So: if “Alain is bald” is somewhat true, how true is it? Can we put a number on it? Let’s say an absolute truth is 1.0 true, and an absolute falsehood is 0.0 true, and “Alain is bald” is 0.7384261 true. This addresses the intuition that some sort-of truths are more true than others.3

Fact Truth
Alain is bald 0.7384261

Putting numbers on truth doesn’t buy you anything unless you can use math to get results that wouldn’t be obvious otherwise. For example, if—

  1. you somehow determine that “the gboma↗︎︎, an edible plant species related to the common eggplant, is also an eggplant” is 0.8360851 true; and
  2. “when you swallow a baby eggplant whole, it remains an eggplant for a while in your stomach as you digest it” is 0.71959253 true; and
  3. if there were a way of combining these observations arithmetically to discover that “a baby gboma is an eggplant when you swallow it whole” is 0.6460186 true; and
  4. the number 0.6460186 could tell you something of practical value in deciding what to do with a baby gboma;

—if all these were feasible, this would be a compelling theory. Unfortunately, none seem likely.

In particular, no version of this approach handles combination (point 3 above) meaningfully, nor does it seem that any arithmetical theory could.

Also, it may make sense to say that one statement is more true than another when both concern a single continuously-varying property. But comparing how true “maroon is a red” is with how true “a gboma is an eggplant” is seems inherently meaningless. Assigning a consistent set of numbers to diverse statements seems impossible.4

This points to a more serious and pervasive problem: nebulosity is not mostly about quantitative degree. In fact, even the standard examples used to illustrate theories of vagueness are not, when considered more seriously, simply matters of degree. Suppose Daniel has 10,000 hairs mostly at the back of his head and Erika has 8,000 spread evenly: one might judge that Daniel is mostly bald, but Erika just has thin hair. Spatial distribution matters; that is why hair transplantation surgery can make a bald person non-bald. However, distribution would be difficult (and probably meaningless) to quantify.

Color is another standard example: where does red turn into orange? But even the simplest color theory has three axes (hue, saturation, lightness). Is vermillion (differing from central red mainly in hue) more or less truly red than crimson (differing from central red mainly in lightness)? You could create a unified difference metric by choosing axis weights, but it would have no meaning, unless it were formulated to address a particular practical purpose. Anyway, the hue/saturation/lightness model applies only to abstract pure colors of light, not to the real world.

Physical objects rarely if ever have “a color.” Examined closely, a “red” apple is invariably speckled, mottled, and streaked with various other colors. It is sometimes possible to say one apple is redder than another, but often no comparison is possible. They are both “red,” but quite differently so. The same may be true even of steel parts painted as uniformly gray as is practically feasible: close up, some texture is visible even to the naked eye. Different “gray” paints also vary slightly in hue, as well as lightness: detectably reddish, greenish, bluish. Shades of gray do not, in fact, form a continuum.

Further, color is not an intrinsic property of a point on a surface, but depends on illumination and viewing angle:

  • Depending on the spectrum of incoming light, different wavelengths reflect from the same object. Even outdoors, the color of sky light depends on the weather and time of day. Our nervous system performs elaborate processing to compensate, so we rarely notice the objectively large differences.5

  • Viewing angle affects apparent colors because some materials send different wavelengths in different directions. Most dramatic are pigments that change their apparent color completely when you move your head. They are used both as car paints↗︎︎ and as an anti-counterfeiting measure on money↗︎︎.6

Even considering all these peculiarities, color is one of the simplest cases of nebulosity—which is why it is the one most-often tackled by rationalists seeking a work-around. Most categories, properties, and relationships, when examined closely, have unenumerable dimensions of variation. You cannot, in practice, specify all the ways an object differs from others—nor limit which aspects may be relevant in some future situation.

This is another manifestation of the same problem that bedeviled attempts at category specification in the previous chapter: the weird exceptions, complications, and borderline cases; the proliferation of variant subcategories, and the unbounded recursive expansion of features with features with features.

Rationalist analyses of vagueness jumped from the messy complexity of the real world (the colors of an apple) to a simplistic formal abstraction (a single axis of near-red hues). Then they devised esoteric mathematical techniques to attempt to solve the irrelevant simplistic problem. But those formalisms didn’t work even for that.

Let’s go back to the fictional dialogue at the beginning of this chapter. Both the anti-rationalist and the rationalist were partly right. The anti-rationalist was right that rationalists tend to make trivial formal models that leave out critical details, and talk themselves into absurd conclusions by mistaking their model as Truth. (Later in the book, we’ll talk about how to avoid this common error pattern.) This can include an insistence on binary “black and white” oppositions between poles that are not exclusive; notably, absolute truth vs. falsity.

The rationalist was right that continuously-graded phenomena are no obstacle to rationality. Many rationalists would go further:

Look, this whole discussion is making things much too complicated. “Bald” and “gray” are themselves just models. Every engineer learns that models are never perfect. They work because they approximate reality closely enough.

This is approximately true, and important. It points in the general direction of The Eggplant’s account of rationality. (You could take the whole book as applying an engineer’s attitude to traditionally philosophical questions.) However, the next chapter explains why “models are approximations” is only approximately true, and not an adequate understanding of nebulosity in general.

In fact, any attempt to make a definite theory of an inherently indefinite reality can’t work in general. It may produce a useful model in restricted circumstances.

When your model runs into trouble, you may need to do some ontological remodeling↗︎︎ as part of building a more sophisticated one. There are various typical patterns for ontological change (discussed later in this book). One of the simplest and most common is replacing a binary opposition with a continuum.

The anti-rationalist’s invocation of “shades of gray” might be a way of pointing to the rationalist tendency to stick to a fixed formal model for too long. Rationalists do tend toward a stubborn reluctance to give up on models that aren’t working, and resist doing the meta-rational↗︎︎ work of finding alternatives.

On the other hand, rationalists’ attempts to account for nebulosity using numbers for belief strength or for degrees of truth are examples of exactly the remodeling pattern the anti-rationalist recommended (“shades of gray”).

We found that these models of truth and belief were also inadequate as general theories, although both are routinely used in practice in some domains where they are effective. I suggested that they fail as universals because categories have many “dimensions of variation.” This is another common pattern of ontological remodeling: replacing a single variable with a bundle of several. Again the result is not accurate in general; there are no objective “dimensions” to the variability of eggplant-sized phenomena. That’s just another, more complex formal model of nebulosity. It’s more nearly accurate in a broader variety of cases, but not an absolute truth.

Looking ahead, what alternative approaches can reasonableness and meta-rationality offer?

Reasonableness↗︎︎ is not interested in universality. It aims to get practical work done in specific situations. Precise definitions and absolute truths are rarely necessary or helpful for that. Is this thing an eggplant? Depends on what you are trying to do with it. Is there water in the refrigerator? Well, what do you want it for? What counts as baldness, fruit, red, or water depends on your purposes, and on all sorts of details of the situation. Those details are so numerous and various that they can’t all be taken into account ahead of time to make a general formal theory. Any factor might matter in some situation. On the other hand, nearly all are irrelevant in any specific situation, so determining whether the water in an eggplant counts, or if Alain is bald, is usually easy.

Usually, but not always. Rationality comes into play in the anomalous difficult cases. Then reasoning within a formal model may provide extraordinary value. But which formal model? What factors should it take into account, out of unenumerable details? In what sense does it matter whether this thing is an eggplant? Is it adequate to record “to what degree” the transplant patient is bald, or do we need a more sophisticated description? These are meta-rational↗︎︎ questions.

  • 1. For more detailed reviews, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries for “Vagueness↗︎︎” and “Sorites Paradox↗︎︎.”
  • 2. The best-known semantic approach to vagueness is called “supervaluationism.” It adds new truth values “supertrue” and “superfalse” to logic. How those work is hard to explain, so I won’t. Simple versions of supervaluationism fail quickly, so advocates have devised complex variants that handle some problem cases, and argue extensively about which one works least badly. No one seems to be really happy with any of them, though.
  • 3. Theories of this sort are called infinite-valued logics. Fuzzy logic is the best-known of several varieties.
  • 4. Infinite-valued logic runs into numerous other technical and philosophical problems. For a catalog of objections, and replies to them from an advocate, see Jeremy Bradley’s 2009 “Fuzzy Logic as a Theory of Vagueness: 15 Conceptual Questions↗︎︎,” pp. 207–228 in Views on Fuzzy Sets and Systems from Different Perspectives (2009). Originally developed as an ontological model for vague language, fuzzy logic is said to have significant engineering applications, but hardly anyone still accepts it as metaphysically accurate.
  • 5. The nervous system’s attempt to correct perceived color for illumination is called “color constancy↗︎︎.” That usually works well, but can be fooled, giving rise to startling optical illusions. The details of its operation are complex and not fully understood. It apparently involves processing both within the retina and in the brain’s visual cortex.
  • 6. The ancient Romans produced “dichroic glass↗︎︎,” which changes color according to the angle of illumination, using silver and gold nanoparticles. The most spectacular example is the Lycurgus Cup↗︎︎, which is red when lit from behind and green when lit from the front.

Overdriving approximation

Glowing vacuum tubes

Vacuum tubes glowing in a Marshall guitar amplifier. Image courtesy↗︎︎ Shane Gorski

A physicist, economist, or electrical engineer might object to our story so far:

Good models are made with real math, not formal logic. Nobody uses that stuff, so nobody cares if it doesn’t work. And nobody expects a model to be exact, so this whole “no absolute truth” business is irrelevant. What matters is getting a good enough approximation.

There’s two parts to this, and they are both somewhat true. First, formal logic is indeed mostly useless in practice, for all the many reasons discussed in this Part of The Eggplant.1 Second, approximate numerical models are powerfully useful in some fields.

However, approximation is not an adequate general understanding for how rational models can work well in the face of nebulosity↗︎︎.

In physics, and many branches of engineering, most models are numerical. Consider an amplifier. The simplest model is linear:

Vout = μ × Vin + V0

The output voltage is equal to the input voltage times a constant amplification amount μ, plus a constant offset V0, which is the output for a zero input.

Graphed, this is a straight line:

Linear amplifier model

I will replace these hand-drawn graphs with computer ones in the published version of the book

The model is not absolutely true. For small enough positive or negative inputs, it’s very nearly true. However, the amplifier has a limited output range, so large enough inputs can no longer be amplified. You have to limit inputs if you want the amplifier to behave properly. A second, more complex model:

Piecewise-linear amplifier model

I spent hours fighting matplotlib and gave up for the time being

If you measure the output of a vacuum tube guitar amplifier as a function of input, it looks something like this:

Measured amplifier output

Graphics programs all do the same things, but hide the functionality in different places

The second model is pretty accurate except near the limits, where the measured behavior is smoothly curved, not sharply kinked. But even the middle section of the curve is never a perfectly straight line. That’s a good approximation, and we can find a numerical bound on how bad it might be—how far it gets from the measured behavior. Successively more complex amplifier models fit the S-shaped curve increasingly accurately—meaning with smaller errors—by taking into account increasingly many physical effects that affect it.

In most amplifier applications, linear behavior is optimal, so you make sure the input voltage stays within the nearly-straight part of the curve:

Graph with nearly-linear region highlighted

I’m sure there’s some way to tell matplotlib to not crash the x axis label into the axis, but how much of my life do I want to spend finding it?

Vacuum tube guitar amplifiers are an exception. Typically they have deliberately wide non-linear (curved) regions, and are designed so that normal inputs overdrive the amplifier into the curves. That distorts the output—wonderfully, if you like electric blues or hard rock! Increasing overdrive makes the amplified guitar sound successively “warm,” “growly,” and “dirty”; and eventually produces random noise unrelated to what you’re playing on the instrument. Sufficiently high voltage inputs will start to melt components, resulting in short or open circuits; and then internal arcing; and the output will diverge from the model without bound.

Drugs and poisons often behave analogously to amplifiers. They show a “dose-response relationship↗︎︎”: for example, the more painkillers you take, the less pain you feel. The dose-response relationship is often nearly linear within limits. However, there may be a minimal, threshold dose required to get any effect, and exceeding some maximum dose does not increase the effect. Here’s the dose-response curve for a measured carcinogen effect:

Sigmoidal dose-response curve

Dose-response curve courtesy↗︎︎ Wikipedia

Let’s generalize a pattern from these examples. A numerically approximate model has:

  • A domain of applicability, within which it works well.2
  • Bounded error, a numerical measure of how wrong it might be if applied within its domain. The error bound may be fixed, or else can be calculated from readily-available parameters.

In earlier chapters, we’ve seen that most knowledge is only sort-of true. The objection at the beginning of this one suggested that sort-of-true knowlege can be understood as an approximation to reality. When its error bound is small enough to get a particular job done, the model is useful, even though it is not absolutely true. If it’s not, you need to find a more accurate model.

This is great when you can get it! An approximate model often works for engineered devices, because they are designed and manufactured to conform to that very model. It is feasible to build computers only because we can—after billions of dollars and decades of research and development effort—manufacture transistors that reliably conform to specifications, within bounded error.

But most sort-of truths aren’t like that. We don’t have numerically approximate models for most things, and aren’t likely to get them. Formal logic is not adequate as a universal framework for constructing rational models, but neither are physics-like numerical formulae. Such models are rare in molecular biology, for example; and when they are possible, they work only “usually.” Unenumerable, mostly unknown factors within a cell may cause a model to break down.

Earlier I used “gene” as an example of a vague term. Some particular bit of DNA is not approximately a gene. It may definitely be one, or not, and it may be “sort of” a gene, but never a gene “to within an error bound.” Likewise, in software engineering, “more-or-less an MVC architecture” is not quantifiable.

To work well, for most rational models, many conditions must hold. I’ll call these usualness conditions.3 Typically, we don’t know what they all are, and there’s no practical way to find out. Some are unknown unknowns. As a consequence, domains of applicability are nebulous, with indefinite boundaries that depend on contexts and purposes.4

Truth in physics and physics-like engineering is different from truth in logic, as the objection at the beginning of the chapter noted. Physics is approximately true, not absolutely true (except possibly at the elementary particle scale). But truth elsewhere is different again; it’s usually-true-in-the-sense-adequate-to-get-the-job-done. Ways of reasoning that work for numerically approximate truth do not work for usually-adequate truth, so approximation is not an adequate general model of model adequacy.5

We can still do science and engineering in many fields in which error bounds are unavailable. We can still construct good-enough models. A good explanation of rationality has to provide a better understanding of model adequacy than approximation does.

The objection suggested a simple model of model adequacy, the approximation model of models. According to this meta-model, rational models are approximately true, within a well-defined domain of applicability. The approximation model itself has a domain of applicability: it works well for physics-like models. If you try to push it too hard, you overdrive the meta-model into distortion. Applied to software engineering, for example, it can only produce random noise.

An oft-repeated adage, by George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”6 This is usually true, but also sometimes worse than useless. It can be abused as a facile dismissal of the very point it makes, by implying that of course everyone knows there are no absolute truths, and that this isn’t a problem, so we can ignore it. (As the objection suggested.)

But it is a problem: to use a model usefully, you have to find out how and when and why it is useful, and how and when and why it fails. Otherwise, it is likely to burn you at an awkward time, like an amplifier overdriven to the point that it catches fire.

As Box put it: “The scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad.”

Inquiry into how and when and why a model works is central to meta-rationality↗︎︎.

  • 1. Computer science is the main exception, because computers are spectacularly engineered to implement formal logic.
  • 2. There doesn’t seem to be a standard term for what I’m calling “domain of applicability.” Some people do use that phrase; others say “range of applicability,” which seems less accurate in terms of the mathematical usage of “domain” and “range.”
  • 3. “Usualness conditions” is not a standard term. Several fields have equivalent concepts. In philosophy, they are called “ceteris paribus conditions” or “background assumptions.” I figure you don’t want Latin; and “assumptions” is misleading because you usually know what your assumptions are, whereas you usually don’t know all the usualness conditions.
  • 4. In fact, even the most sophisticated transistor models are only usually true, and not always approximately true. For example, high-energy particles from natural sources disrupt transistor operation often enough to be a significant design issue for computers. Background radiation occasionally “flips a bit” in computer memory. Cosmic rays can make transistors glitch temporarily, or alter their behavior permanently, or destroy them outright. An approximate model can be powerfully useful, but you still need to bear in mind the nebulosity of its domain of applicability, and the possibility of unknown usualness conditions.
  • 5. Sometimes usually-adequate models are loosely described as “approximate.” That is harmless if everyone understands that “approximate” is being used imprecisely. However, it is misleading (and occasionally catastrophic) if it leads to the implicit assumption that the model is accurate to within an error bound. More broadly, it is misleading when it reinforces the rationalist fantasy of guarantees for rationality.
  • 6. “Science and Statistics,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71:356 (1976), pp. 791–799.

Reference: rationalism’s reality problem

Samoyed and formulae

Referring to Samantha. Samoyed photo courtesy↗︎︎ JF Brou

Representations must refer to something; truths should be true of something; beliefs have to be about something. For example, the belief “Samantha the Samoyed is white” is about (and refers to) Samantha.

Most rationalisms↗︎︎ hold versions of the correspondence theory of truth, which says, more-or-less, that “Samantha is white” is true because Samantha is white.

This theory is usually pretty much true.1 The problem is not that it is false. Its failing is that most of what you’d need to make the story work is missing. It’s not really a theory at all; it’s a vague specification of what a rationalist↗︎︎ epistemology↗︎︎ would need to do, without an account of how. It doesn’t explain:

  1. What sort of thing is a representation, or belief, such that it can refer to a Samoyed?
  2. What sort of relationship is reference (or aboutness, or correspondence)? How does that work in the material world?
  3. What sorts of things are capable of being referred to by a belief?
  4. How does “Samantha” pick out a particular Samoyed? Bearing in mind that there are many with that name.

These questions sound at first like ivory tower metaphysics, with no relevance to everyday technical work. However, instances include important practical, technical, and social problems. For example, how does a bank connect the representation “David Chapman” in its database with me? Personal identity verification is complex and never perfectly reliable.

Rationalist philosophy has failed to provide answers to the key questions about reference, despite huge effort.2 Attempted answers typically are metaphysical, and don’t seem compatible with a naturalistic worldview. The abstract formulae of rationality seem non-physical. How can an abstraction interact with a dog? If the interaction itself is abstract, how does it connect to the dog? If the interaction is physical, how does it connect to the formula? Alternatively, if formulae are physical after all, what sort of physical thing are they? Formal reasoning depends on “Samoyed(Samantha)” displayed on a computer screen being the same thing as “Samoyed(Samantha)” written on paper. How does that work? And, how does either of those physical things physically connect to a dog?

The next several chapters of The Eggplant explore these and other difficulties for rationalist epistemology and ontology↗︎︎. The aim is not a philosophical refutation. Rather, it’s to motivate particular aspects of the meta-rational↗︎︎ alternative, in practical terms.

I will suggest naturalistic answers, compatible with a materialist worldview, which also seem to better reflect how rationality works in practice. Taking questions 1-4 out of the metaphysical realm turns them into practical, everyday problems, whose answers can be critical to the success of rationality. In Part Two, we’ll see how reasonableness↗︎︎ (unlike rationality) deals directly with the material and social world, and what this implies for belief, reference, and truth. Part Three explains how rationality depends on reasonableness’ aid for making beliefs be about things. Parts Four and Five explain how, by understanding this, you can sometimes make rationality work better.

Not to hold you in suspense: aboutness is something we do together. Abstracting from reality to the formal realm, and applying formal results to reality, are activities we perform via perception, action, improvisation, interpretation, and negotiation. The correspondence theory of truth works only because we make it work, each time we need it—by any means necessary.

The question then becomes “what are some concrete methods people use for making beliefs be about things?” The answer will be “here are several, but there are unenumerably many more.” For example, you can alter reality to fit rationality by physically attaching identity labels to things. You can put a metal tag that says “Samantha” on her collar. That helps make the name reliably refer to the dog. If you put up a LOST DOG poster, someone who believes “I’ve found Samantha” may depend on that. You could go further and have your vet inject her with a radio frequency microchip, with her National Dog Registry number on it. “How we refer,” in Part Two, explains another dozen reasonable↗︎︎ methods.

Such suggestions may seem unsatisfactory, because they won’t lead to a unified abstract rational theory of belief, reference, and truth. Indeed, in the Eggplant understanding, each of those metaphysical categories disintegrates into a hodgepodge of concrete practical considerations, connected only by a nebulous↗︎︎ “family resemblance.” There is no single common feature, it’s just that this is similar to that, which is similar to another thing.3

I don’t think unified theories of belief, reference, or truth are possible—which is why no one has found them. But, proving this in principle is not necessary. We know for sure that we don’t currently have workable rational theories of them; and yet that is no obstacle to our using rationality effectively.

And, I will suggest that sometimes we can do rationality better by drawing on the nebulous, naturalistic account that I’ve just sketched. That often includes understanding correspondence as part of the story. Correspondence does often explain rationality’s effectiveness. It’s just that correspondence is something you have to figure out how to make happen, on-goingly. It’s not something that occurs by magic, or that is once-and-done.

One major meta-rational↗︎︎ activity is examining the theory/reality relationship to see if it is working as well as it could.

  • Sometimes you may not notice your rational model is wrong, because the routine practical work of maintaining the correspondence relationship compensates for, and covers up, the model’s defects, which appear as routinely manageable hassles.
  • Sometimes the system suddenly breaks down when its lack of contact with reality can no longer be papered over with reasonableness.
  • Sometimes a system can be made to work better by improving concrete practices for maintaining correspondences.
  • Sometimes insights about details of how abstraction and theory application are accomplished lead to improvements in the rational system.

All these are central aspects of meta-rationality.

  • 1. Although, for several reasons, the correspondence theory is not straightforwardly and entirely true. Metaphor is an example: what would it even mean for “financial market storm-watchers are eyeing a growing debt default typhoon” to be true? Various schools of philosophers and semanticists have attempted to account for such difficulties. The Eggplant’s alternative explanation in Part Two is quite different.
  • 2. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s “Correspondence Theory of Truth↗︎︎” article explains some of the problems. The “Reference↗︎︎” and “Intentionality↗︎︎” ones cover closely related topics. Particular philosophers advocate one approach over another, but nearly all acknowledge major unresolved difficulties, on which significant short-term progress seems unlikely.
  • 3. The understanding of categories in terms of “family resemblance” originates with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎.

The National Omelet Registry

Breakfast in Prague

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Phil Hei

I made omelets for breakfast, and served us each one. “Mine is bigger!” you said. “Yeah, since you’re going to the gym, I figured you could use some extra protein.”

When you looked at both omelets, you saw that “mine is bigger,” and you believed “mine is bigger,” and it was true:

Sentence Believed Truth
Mine is bigger True True

If “mine is bigger” is true, then shouldn’t I believe it too? But it isn’t true… not if I believe it. Only when you believe it.

There’s a broader problem here: statements whose meaning, and truth, depend on something other than the statement itself. In this case, it is who is saying, or believing, the statement. Linguists have cataloged a huge variety of related issues.1 “The dog is a Samoyed” is another example: it is true or false depending on which dog is the dog, and that depends on the context.

The great thing about “239” is that it definitely, eternally, unambiguously refers to the same object, namely the number 239.2 This makes it much easier to evaluate the truth of statements like “239 is prime,” because they always mean the same thing.

So there seems an obvious fix for “the dog is a Samoyed.” Let’s outlaw context-dependent beliefs by decree. You don’t believe the sentence, you believe what it means, which specifies which dog. You can believe “dog1514670 is a Samoyed.” That’s legal because dog1514670 is in the National Dog Registry. There’s only one dog with that ID number, so it refers to the same one in every context, and “dog1514670 is a Samoyed” always means the same thing.

Now you can reason about the Samoyed by applying a universal truth: Samoyeds shed a lot. dog1514670 is a Samoyed, so dog1514670 sheds a lot. If that is true of Samantha, the correspondence theory of truth is vindicated.

At breakfast, we both saw the same thing, so we should both believe the same thing. If there were a National Omelet Registry, we could go look the two of them up on its web site, and could believe “omelet681650346 is bigger than omelet798267196.”

Unfortunately, there is no National Omelet Registry.

What sort of world would rationalism↗︎︎ be true of? It would need a Cosmic Object Registry to issue a unique ID number for every object in the universe.3 What physical process could get our brains to believe propositions involving globally unique object IDs? Unfortunately, we cannot consult a Cosmic Object Registry via astral connection. And omelets do not come with radio frequency microchips.

Your omelet and mine were visibly different. If every object was perceptually unique, we could believe sentences like “regarding the omelet that, uniquely in the universe, looks like so-and-so: it is bigger than the one that looks like such-and-such.”4 But objects are frequently indistinguishable in practice, which means that forming beliefs based on unique descriptions is infeasible. If you see a swarm of gnats swirling over a creek, you cannot mentally represent this in terms of distinctive visible characteristics of the individual insects.

Linguists and philosophers originally believed that context-dependency was restricted to a handful of red-flag words like “mine,” “the,” and “today.” They devised technical fixes meant to address each. But gradually it became clear that context-dependency is pervasive.

For reasonableness↗︎︎, context-dependency isn’t a problem; it’s the solution to many practical problems. Which eggplant am I cutting up for moussaka? The question answers itself: it is the one I am cutting up. There’s only one of those, and it is right in front of me. There’s no ambiguity, and I don’t need to look it up in the Cosmic Object Registry to reason about it. In this and other ways, context-dependence makes reasonableness more efficient than rationality↗︎︎. (This trades off against rationality’s power, precision, and accuracy in situations in which it is useful.)

In the meta-rational↗︎︎ understanding, context-dependency is not a collection of pathological exceptions to meaning’s typical good behavior. Virtually all sentences, beliefs, or representations about the eggplant-sized world are context-dependent. This is unavoidable for multiple reasons, including the practical impossibility of referring to specific objects other than relative to oneself. Once you accept that, many problems faced by rationalism evaporate. Context-dependency is not a source of problems we should eliminate; it provides resources that rationality depends on to work—even when a rational system has found a universal truth that is true regardless of context.

  • 1. The relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article is “Indexicality↗︎︎.”
  • 2. Unambiguously—except for the number base you are using, social conventions about numerals, and so on. For contrast with physical reality, let’s pretend mathematics is free from the issues that cause rationalism problems, even if it’s not altogether true.
  • 3. See Philip Agre’s Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎ for extensive discussion of the object identity problem. (Page 244 discusses the “cosmic registry of forks.”) Logical positivism treated this as the question of how proper names refer to individuals; see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Names↗︎︎.” In 1970s-’80s artificial intelligence, “knowledge representation systems” explicitly assigned unique ID numbers to every specific object they encountered. Present-day rationalisms seem to depend on this possibility implicitly, but because nowadays no one seriously attempts to explain how rationalism would work in practice, the necessity does not become obvious. It is tacitly assumed that beliefs could refer to specific individuals somehow, without considering what mechanism might achieve that.
  • 4. This is the “Description Theory of Names.” Again see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Names↗︎︎,” for arguments for and against this and other theories.

Objects, objectively

Decaying chair with dramatic clouds

Decaying chair with clouds. Image courtesy↗︎︎ MXX SXX

Here is a powerful argument, often used in support of rationalism↗︎︎, that ontological↗︎︎ nebulosity↗︎︎ is impossible:

An object is just atoms, and atoms have precisely fixed, objective behaviors. So we know from physics that an object doesn’t depend on your subjective ideas about it. There’s only one real world. Different people may have different beliefs or concepts about it, but that doesn’t affect what’s true. We don’t each get our own reality; only our own subjective opinions. Your supposed “nebulosity” just boils down to people having different theories, some of which are true, and some of which are false. It’s just epistemological↗︎︎ fuzziness. There’s no fuzziness in objective reality.

Quantum field theory is the closest thing we have to an absolute truth about physical reality. The physicist Richard Feynman was one of its major architects. He wrote:

What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about any more. The atoms are evaporating from it from time to time—not many atoms, but a few—dirt falls on it and gets dissolved in the paint; so to define a chair precisely, to say exactly which atoms are chair, and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, or which atoms are paint that belongs to the chair is impossible. So the mass of a chair can be defined only approximately.

There are not any single, left-alone objects in the world. If we are not too precise we may idealize the chair as a definite thing. One may prefer a mathematical definition; but mathematical definitions can never work in the real world.1

There are no absolute truths about an eggplant-sized object, because there is no absolute truth about which atoms make it up. The physical boundaries of a physical object are always nebulous, to varying degrees.2

Let’s follow Feynman’s argument in a more dramatic case, a wispy cloud. Some atoms are clearly in the cloud, and some are clearly out, but there’s a fuzzy margin. This is not a matter of uncertainty. There’s just no absolute or objective truth about whether some atoms are part of the cloud or not. Those could easily be ten percent of all the atoms that might reasonably be counted as part of the cloud. A cloud’s mass is roughly a million kilograms, so this “slop” is on the order of a hundred tons.

The mass of a set of atoms is objectively well-defined. But a cloud or a chair or an eggplant is not a specific set of atoms. If you look at the surface even of a stainless steel ball bearing under a powerful enough microscope, in sufficiently slow motion, in the same way there will be atoms loosely associated but not definitely either part of it or part of its surrounds.

Mass is a fundamental physical property. If the mass of an object is nebulous, how much more so its shape, compressibility, or pathogenicity?

The absolute truths of quantum field theory don’t apply precisely if you can’t say precisely what you want to apply them to. So, why not do that? Can’t we define precisely, mathematically, objectively what an object is? We could find some criterion that would tell us exactly which atoms are part of the cloud or chair. Something about density or homogeneity of composition or cohesive force.

We could do that—and it would be a subjective concept. It would involve arbitrary threshold quantities. Different people could reasonably choose different cut-off values: exactly how cohesive? There’s no objectively preferable answer. In some cases, tiny differences in the cohesion threshold would dramatically change what counts as “part” of an object; and no matter what the value is, the boundaries drawn by the objective criterion would often fail to correspond to anything useful. If you superglue a toothbrush to an eggplant, you don’t get one object, you get two objects stuck together with bonds stronger than the internal cohesive forces of either. On the other hand, there’s zero force binding together the water droplets that make up a cloud; they are just carried along in parallel by the wind.

The rationalist argument was that “we know from physics that an object doesn’t depend on your subjective ideas about it.” But Feynman tells us that we know from physics the opposite: “There are no definite objects in the world; mathematical definitions can never work.”

This doesn’t require any fancy physics. It doesn’t involve quantum indeterminacy. It’s sufficient that eggplants are made out of little bits (particles, atoms, molecules, whatever), and the bits are never either definitely stuck together or not. There are just attractive forces of continuously variable strength.

Misunderstandings of the nebulosity of objects

The non-objectivity of objects is easy to misunderstand. Several subtle misinterpretations are common.3 I’ll explain some briefly here; I intend to cover this in much greater detail elsewhere in Meaningness eventually.

Objects don’t exist, and eggplants are objects, so eggplants don’t exist. Obviously eggplants exist. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that the universe is not intrinsically divided into chunks; certainly not at scales larger than molecules. The problem is not objects, exactly, but objective objectness: qualities of solidity, durability, separateness, homogeneity, and identity.4

Objects are subjective, arbitrary, or conjured into existence by a mental act or social convention. Pluto was there before Clyde Tombaugh discovered it in 1930, and it is not impressed with anyone’s opinions about it. Its atmosphere is tenuous, and loses approximately 5 × 1025 molecules of methane every second. On their way out, there’s no objective truth about when they cease to be part of Pluto. However, the existence of Pluto is not subjective. Reality is not divided into chunks, but it is elaborately patterned↗︎︎. Objective and subjective do not exhaust the possibilities. Objects arise in interaction.5

Objects have a definite, unitary core, giving them an identity; they’re just fuzzy around the edges. Not true in general. If it were, there would be a fact about how many clouds there were in a particular region. But whether or not two dense bits of cloud are “connected” by a wispier bit (and therefore parts of one cloud), or not (and therefore two separate ones), is not objective.

It’s about physical nondeterminism. If all motion in a cloud and its vicinity suddenly stopped permanently, the cloud would still be indefinite, although perfectly deterministic. Quantum indeterminacy is mostly irrelevant to nebulosity. Dynamical chaos (macroscopic de facto nondeterminism) does add to nebulosity, but it’s not necessary for it.

It’s about emergence. The concept “emergence” addresses some of the same problems as “nebulosity,” in quite a different way. The idea is notoriously confused, and it’s not clear there is any coherent version.6 That makes it somewhat difficult to say exactly how the two differ. However, emergent entities and properties are generally taken to be objective: independent of contexts and purposes. Nebulous objects and properties generally aren’t.

Objects, rationality, and reasonableness

Rationally-held beliefs are mostly about indefinite objects—magmatic dikes, mold sprues, killer-T cells—and in science and engineering we have to accept this as a fact of life.

“If we are not too precise we may idealize the chair as a definite thing,” said Feynman. In rational practice, we use ontologies that assume the existence of definite objects with definite properties. Such an idealization cannot precisely reflect the real world, because there are no such. “One may prefer a mathematical definition; but mathematical definitions can never work in the real world.”

So, why does this work? How can we choose ontologies that do work, despite not being “true”?7 How does a good ontology relate effectively to reality, if not as a faithful reflection? These are central concerns of meta-rationality↗︎︎, and main topics of Parts Three and Four.

In reasonable↗︎︎ everyday activity, it’s usually not a problem that the world cannot be divided into definite objects. When you make an omelet, the butter, milk, and eggs mix partially, in no particular way. Your ability to work effectively with the non-objectness of these materials depends on non-rational skills of perception and manipulation, which can impose boundaries on their nebulosity. It also depends on a shielding technology: the frying pan, a container which limits the spread of their runniness. If the pan has a teflon lining, it can also mostly prevent the formation of chemical bonds between egg proteins and the pan, which would muddle a boundary unhelpfully. (As you know if you’ve cursed while scrubbing the result off an inadequately seasoned iron skillet.) Part Two further explains the effectiveness of reasonable, non-rational activity in indefinite situations.

Meta-rationalism explains the relationship between rationality and reality as mediated by reasonable activity, and as enabled by definiteness-enhancing technologies:

  • We can do science on magmatic dikes, and discover true beliefs about them, because we can distinguish them perceptually well enough for particular purposes, even though they don’t have objectively definite boundaries. Likewise, when a construction crew erects the bridge designed by a civil engineer, they use their non-rational arc-welding skills to translate the abstract geometric objects of the plan into somewhat messy physical realities.

  • Objects in the natural world—marshes and mountains, sticks and streams—are unhelpfully nebulous, which makes rationality difficult. “What sort of world would rationalism be true of?” One with objectively separable objects. How do we make the world more like that? By making objects more definite. For example, we machine them out of metal, or mold them from plastic, so they are rigid, homogeneous in composition, and have better-defined boundaries. We put indefinite messes (cell cultures, for instance) in containers to give them external boundaries, and to shield them from external influences. Rationality works because we’ve engineered the world to more nearly conform to definite ontologies. Shielding technologies, and other methods for making a rational ontology more nearly accurate, are a major theme in Part Three.

Science generally aims for universal, objective truths (and rightly so). However, when you apply rational conclusions to the real world, separation of objects is generally somewhat context-dependent and purpose-dependent. That is because (as we will see) reasonableness critically depends on context and purpose. It carves out chunks that are useful, meaningful, or explanatory.

Do cow hairs that have come out of the follicle but that are stuck to the cow by friction, sweat, or blood count as part of the cow? How about ones that are on the verge of falling out, but are stuck in the follicle by only the weakest of bonds? The reasonable answer is “Dude! It doesn’t matter!”

“It doesn’t matter!” is a major way reasonableness can deal with practical matters that formal rationality cannot. But, this is purpose-relative. If you are loading cows onto a truck, it doesn’t matter. If you are a veterinary researcher studying cow mange, it might matter a lot.

The meta-rational questions are: does it matter, for a particular purpose? If so, how and why? What does this imply about how we should deploy rationality?

  • 1. The Feynman Lectures on Physics↗︎︎, Volume 1, Chapter 12, Section 1. Some phrases omitted for concision.
  • 2. An excellent philosophical discussion, with compelling examples, is Alexandre Linhares’ “A glimpse at the metaphysics of Bongard problems↗︎︎,” Artificial Intelligence 121 (2000) pp. 251–270.
  • 3. In analytic philosophy, the non-objectivity of objects is described as “the problem of the many,” or of “vague objects,” and has been a major topic for several decades. The literature is a mass of confusions. For an overview, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “The Problem of the Many↗︎︎.”
  • 4. I think this is probably why Feynman qualified “there are no objects” with “single, left-alone.” That’s not very clear, but a full explanation is complicated, and will run to many pages in Meaningness.
  • 5. For an explanation of “neither objective nor subjective but interactive,” see “Rumcake and Rainbows” in Meaningness. Interactivity is one key to an accurate understanding of non-objectness, but this is a more philosophical topic than belongs in The Eggplant. The section on “Reasonable objects” in Part Two will give a taste, though.
  • 6. As usual, I’ll suggest an Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article for details: “Emergent properties↗︎︎.” Part of the problem is that “emergence” is taken as the natural alternative to “reduction,” which, as we saw earlier, is also incoherent. Unfortunately, simply inverting a bad idea rarely produces a good one.
  • 7. In some cases, an idealization may be approximately true: we can put a numerical bound on the error in its predictions. As we saw in “Overdriving approximation,” that is not generally possible.

Is this an eggplant which I see before me?

Correspondence fairy maintaining the truth of eggplantness

Perception plays two important roles in rationalism↗︎︎:

  • The correspondence theory of truth does not include a causal explanation of how the correspondence between beliefs and reality comes about. Unfortunately, there are no correspondence fairies to do that job for us. Perception can do at least part of the work.

  • Rational↗︎︎ processes of deduction and induction produce new beliefs from old ones. To get the process started, some beliefs must come from some other source. Those should be “bare facts,” which do not themselves depend on inference or interpretation. Perception is one obvious source of factual knowledge.

Rationalist theories typically make several assumptions, implicitly or explicitly:

  • Perception and rationality are separate modules, with clearly distinct and defined spheres of responsibility, and with a coherent information transfer interface at the boundary.
  • Information flows from unidirectionally, from sense organs (eyes, ears) through perceptual processing to rationality.
  • Perceptual information is inherently factual and objective, although it might be only approximately correct (or, in the case of illusions, outright false).

Specifically what kind of information crosses the interface constrains theories of rationality. What is the division of labor? What work rationality must take responsibility for depends on what work perception can do. This is partly an empirical question (about how perception does work), but partly also a theoretical, conceptual one (about what could work in principle).

So far, every rationalist theory of this sort has run into insuperable in-principle difficulties. Some of these problems were discovered through conceptual analysis by the logical positivists, and were a major reason they abandoned their whole program. Computer vision research worked through others in great technical detail in the 1970s and ’80s. Both these are fascinating stories, but telling them would take another book, and most of the details are not relevant here.

Although diverse technical difficulties suggested many different problems, the underlying issue was always the same: unavoidable nebulosity↗︎︎. So this chapter sketches ways nebulosity complicates the division of labor between perception and rationality. That motivates an alternative understanding of their relationship, which I’ll explain in Part Two. Parts Three and Four rely on that understanding.

This chapter presents four rationalist theories of perception. We’ll find reasons to think each is unworkable. They may seem a bit silly in retrospect, but they are not straw men. They are simplified versions of theories that were major research programs, in different fields, for decades. The aim here is not to prove that no rationalist theory can be adequate, but to explain some specific obstacles. These trouble spots suggest an alternative approach.

  1. It would be ideal for rationalism if perception delivered a set of statements about what the objects in your environment are, with their types and relationships. That’s what rationality wants to get started with. However, assigning objective types and relationships often requires reasoning that goes far beyond what could be expected of perception.

  2. Instead, perception might deliver statements involving only a fixed set of objective, sensory properties of the world, such as shapes and colors. Then it’s rationality’s job to make sense of those. If perception says there’s something red and round, rationality might conclude it’s an apple. However, there are many other sorts of round red things. Much finer discriminations of perceptual properties are required to draw a conclusion. In general, there doesn’t seem to be any fixed perceptual vocabulary that is sufficient to support reasoning.

  3. Sometimes reasoning has to go all the way “down to the pixels,” in which case it’s not clear what work is left for a separate perception module. Maybe rationality can do the whole job? This also does not seem feasible.

  4. There’s strong scientific evidence that biological perception is not objective, reliable, or unbiased. Maybe rationality should be based on measurements taken with objective instruments instead? Unfortunately, instruments can’t be objective either. Sometimes they can be more objective than perception, but they too cannot deliver the absolute truths required by rationalism.

The alternative explanation in part Two drops all the typical rationalist assumptions. Rationality and perception are not modules, and the boundary between perception and higher cognition is nebulous. Information flows in all directions, but perception does not interface with rationality directly; reasonableness↗︎︎ is an intermediary. Perception is egocentric and purpose-relative, not objective and factual, but that is usually what we need in practice.

Perception to formulae

Higher cognition, including rationality, is usually taken as running on something like language or logic. So, from rationality’s point of view, perception ought to deliver a set of statements about the world, such as a list of logical formulae describing everything in your field of view.

(Perception’s output ideally also should be guaranteed true, so rationality has some certainties to start from. In fact, perception is not entirely reliable, due to optical illusions for instance. The unreliability of perception caused logical positivism a great deal of trouble, and was one reason it failed. However, in principle this might be handled in a probabilistic framework, so I won’t discuss this issue further.)

The question is, what sorts of predicates (“words”) can appear in the statements perception produces as outputs? Put another way: what ontology↗︎︎ do perception and rationality use to communicate at their interface?

Here perception faces all the same problems we’ve earlier seen rationality facing. For instance, “eggplant” is nebulous; what counts as one depends on circumstances and purposes. How is perception to make that judgement? As another example, referring to “object396106407” implies that perception solves the individuation and “Cosmic Object Registry” problems. Likewise, whether one thing is “in” another is sometimes nebulous.

Jiló bush

Jilós, courtesy↗︎︎ Remi Nono-Womdim

A further difficulty is that you can learn new terms linguistically. If I tell you a jiló is a plum-sized variety of eggplant that is scarlet when ripe, you would probably recognize one just from that description. How can the perceptual machinery output jiló(object683501482) then? The first time you see one, at least, it seems some deliberate and arguably rational reasoning would be involved.

He said it’s scarlet; this one is sort of reddish orange; I guess that is what ‘scarlet’ means? Anyway it’s obviously not a regular eggplant, but it’s probably closely related because it’s about the same shape and shiny and the sepals look the same… yeah, I’ll go with ‘jiló’.

Otherwise, the definition of “jiló” would need to get “pushed down” into the perception box, so it could do much the same work. But then it seems perception is being forced to do a job that properly belongs in the rationality box. Perhaps every sort of reasoning might be required for accurate judgement in some case or other, so there’s nothing left that’s solely rationality’s responsibility.

So, while it would be convenient for rationality if perception did all the hard work, this division of labor is probably infeasible.

Reasoning from a neutral observation vocabulary

Radicchio

Radicchio image thanks to my foresight while shopping

The first approach drew the boundary at too “high” a level. Perhaps we can move the interface down, so perception does less work and rationality more?

A plausible alternative might be for perception to output statements involving only a fixed set of sensory properties of the world, such as shapes and colors. Then it’s not perception’s job to make the inherently nebulous, ontological judgements about what sorts of things you perceive. It describes objective physical features, and sorting out nebulosity is rationality’s problem.

Logical positivists who pursued this model called the set of predicates that could appear in perception’s outputs a neutral observation vocabulary. It should be “neutral” in not privileging any particular ontology, such as types of things that may exist, or the properties or relationships among them. The opposite would be a theory-laden vocabulary, whose terms implicitly include substantive assumptions about the world—such as eggplants being a distinctive sort of thing. That would be a problem because perception is supposed to deliver “starting” beliefs, bare facts that don’t depend on any theoretical suppositions.

A neutral observation vocabulary would also make the job easier for perception. Unfortunately, it would make it harder for rationality. Too hard; and also still too hard for perception. Let’s take those two problems in turn.

Suppose you have an object in front of you, namely object396106407. Should you believe it is an eggplant? When you look at it, prod it, or chew it, you receive objective “sense data.” Given a sufficient collection of those, you are justified in concluding that it is indeed one.

How? You know something like “∀x purple(x) ∧ oval(x) ∧ moderatelyfirm(x) ∧ bitter(x) ⇒ eggplant(x).” This lists the sense data that allow you to conclude that something is an eggplant. So if you receive the sense data purple(object396106407), oval(object396106407), moderatelyfirm(object396106407), and bitter(object396106407), you know what it is.

Unfortunately, there are purple, oval, moderately firm, bitter things that are not eggplants—radicchios, for example—so that is inadequate. What collection of sense data is adequate to conclude that something is an eggplant? You’d have to add many more criteria to exclude such “false positives.”

White eggplant

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Emmett S.

Also, there are white eggplants. (That is where the name came from originally! They are egg-shaped, and indistinguishable at first glance from hen eggs.) Also, some varieties are spherical; and if you grow one in a box, it might come out cubical. Also, they get soft if you leave them too long in the refrigerator. These “false negative” exceptions also pile up, seemingly indefinitely.

Finding rational conditions to believe something is a member of a macroscopically meaningful category (“eggplants”) faces much the same difficulties as the problem of giving rational conditions for something to be a member. The problems mainly arise from same source: nebulosity. Just as no precise definition of eggplantness is possible, no fixed set of sensory criteria can tell you whether something is a eggplant. That’s partly because what counts as a eggplant depends on purposes and circumstances.

Perception into a neutral observation vocabulary

You can’t mistake a radicchio for an eggplant, because they are not just “purple” and “oval”; they are not the same color or shape at all. Finer distinctions are apparent. You need more information than can be captured at that level. What observation vocabulary would do the job?

As we saw in “When will you go bald?,” color terms like “red,” “gray,” or “purple” don’t straightforwardly correspond to anything in reality, nor anything in sensory experience. The words are often useful, and adequate in many circumstances, but in others you need finer-grained descriptions. What language could express those? There seems to be no fully general way of describing color information better than point-by-point red, green, and blue brightnesses values. And ultimately, color is nebulous, inseparable from texture and context, and it seems no linguistic description could be adequate.

An eggplant is “oval,” although it’s a distinctive sort of ovalness, not the same as the ovalness of a radicchio. Worse, consider clouds. You can, at a glance, distinguish cumulus and cirrus clouds based on their shapes. But the shape of a particular cloud, if you look harder, is extraordinary complex, with all sorts of frilly and streaky and wispy bits. What language of shapes would capture that? There is no general way of describing unique shapes other than the point-by-point outline of an object. And clouds don’t even have outlines! Ultimately, shape is nebulous; the shape of a cloud cannot be described fully accurately and precisely, because there’s nothing precise there.

The aim in devising a neutral observation vocabulary was to be neutral with respect to ontologies of the world by disallowing terms that refer to object types and theory-laden properties. However, these problems with color and shape suggest that it’s not possible to be neutral with respect to an ontology of perception itself. If perception does any processing to summarize the retinal image, the limits of that computation will show up at the interface between perception and rationality, and will shape what sorts of “starting beliefs” rationality can work with.

It seems, then, that in difficult cases, rationality needs access all the way down to the retinal image.

Pushing rationality down to the pixels

The great thing about rationality is that if you give it true inputs, it guarantees true outputs. It’s reliable that way. It’s also universal; you can reason about anything using formal logic. Or anyway, that’s the theory.

Is perception rational? If not, what good is it? After photons hit the retina, perception is some sort of computation, so we can model it formally; it should be just another rational process. It’s unconscious formal inference—or so some rationalists would like to think.

So we can try to push rationality all the way down to the pixels, so to speak. This approach abandons one of the typical rationalist assumptions, that there is a modularity boundary between perception and rationality. It’s a “one box” model.

The information delivered by the eye is something like “at such-and-such an instant, several photons within such-and-such a frequency range arrived at a cone cell at such-and-such a position on the retina.”1 This is a reassuringly objective and physical fact; and you can reason about a set of such measurements.

While treating perception just as an application of general-purpose rational inference might be possible in principle, attempts to do so in practice run into seemingly insuperable conceptual and computational obstacles.

Conceptually, just declaring that rationality will do the whole job doesn’t address the question of how. The one-box model requires rationality to solve both kinds of problems we saw in the “neutral observation vocabulary” model—the problems that seemed insuperable for rationality, plus the ones that seemed insuperable for perception. To be credible, the approach requires a plausible explanation of how one can reason from pixels to statements, and none has yet been found.

Computationally, the problem is the sheer quantity of work that would be required. The human retina has a resolution of tens of megapixels, delivered about sixty times per second.2 Applying general logical inference to a billion data points per second does not seem feasible, for either computers or the brain.

Indeed, the brain is not one general-purpose box. Perception is partly modular. The first few stages of perceptual information processing use specialized neural circuitry to compute fixed, efficient algorithms that are dissimilar to general rational inference.

Still, uniform one-box models remain popular. “Deep learning” systems are surprisingly good at image classification, and some researchers hope to extend them to general rationality. However, much of their success appears to derive from arranging them specifically to compute convolutions, which had long been known as a special purpose method in the early stages of visual processing. Further, image classification is not general perception, and deep learning systems are notoriously bad at recognizing spatial relationships.3 It also seems unlikely that deep learning systems can be made to reason with nested logical quantifiers, which is presumably part of rationality.

Probabilistic (“Bayesian”↗︎︎) one-box approaches are also popular now. They seem to depend on the implicit belief that probabilistic inference encompasses the whole of rationality. As we’ll see in the chapter on probabilism, this is unambiguously mistaken. These approaches also do not (yet) include any worked-out practical theory of how to begin statistical inference from pixels.

Maybe someday somehow some one-box, rationality-does-everything model can be made to work. It doesn’t seem a promising approach to me.

Instruments instead

Since biological perception is subjective, unreliable, and ontologically biased, maybe it’s the wrong starting point for rationality. Some logical positivists came to that conclusion, in any case. Instead, they suggested, reliable knowledge must based on artificial scientific instruments, which measure objective physical properties and have unambiguous numerical outputs. If a pH meter with a digital readout says the pH is 5.7, there is no room for doubt that it is actually saying 8.3.

This rethinking seemed promising for a while. As a result, “empirical” has come to often mean “grounded in scientific experiments” rather than “grounded in human perception.” Likewise, “rational” is now sometimes taken to mean “a conclusion justified by a scientific experiment.”

Unfortunately, this armchair philosophical theory idealizes scientific instruments in a way no working scientist would. It would be lovely if you could point a spectrophotometer at a fruit and it would give you an reliable, objective measure of its color, but they don’t work like that. They can’t, for all the same reasons eyes can’t. “Color” is not an objective property.

Laboratory apparatus is always also, to varying degrees, balky and capricious. All instruments may go out of calibration, while still being approximately or probabilistically right. Worse, they may give good results usually, but be wildly off in unusual, hard to define circumstances.

Scientists spend much of their time bullying equipment into behaving well enough for long enough to get an experiment done. Making meaningful scientific measurements usually involves frequent application of common sense, specialized technical knowledge, and practical laboratory know-how, much of which can’t be codified. pH meters, for example, are notoriously persnickety. You have to calibrate them before every use, and clean and store them carefully after each use. Even then, if they give a reading that seems wrong, you clean them again and try again, and reset the calibration again, and eventually give up and replace their “glass electrode” that is the actual sensor.

The meaning of any experiment depends on an unbounded set of unwritten usualness conditions. Whether and how much to trust an instrument is always a matter of interpretation; a non-rational judgement call. That’s one reason we do control experiments, to deal with as many usualness violations as is feasible. In practice, this can work very well, but there are no guarantees.

There’s another problem: scientific instruments are not ontologically neutral; their outputs are “theory-laden” and not bare facts. You can only believe a measurement is meaningful—never mind reliable—if you already accept particular concepts, assumptions, and theories; and those are always to some degree nebulous and uncertain.4 For example, the value of a pH meter reading depends on an ontology in which pH is an actual physical property. From high school chemistry, this would seem to be unproblematic: it is the negation of the logarithm of the hydrogen ion concentration. On the other hand, some mainstream authorities in physical chemistry say that pH is conceptually incoherent, physically meaningless, and cannot be measured even in principle.5

Instruments do let you make observations the unaided senses can’t, of course. DNA evidence could be helpful in judging whether something is an eggplant if you are otherwise unsure. But it is never entirely reliable: eggplant DNA might show up in things that aren’t eggplants for lots of reasons, and a DNA test could fail to find eggplant DNA in an eggplant for lots of reasons. And DNA can’t address the ontological issues at all. It can’t tell you whether a gboma counts as an eggplant; and no evidence can nail down what species something is in cases where that is inherently nebulous↗︎︎, such as “ring species↗︎︎.”

For all these reasons, there’s no set of scientific measurements that could determine, as definite fact, that object396106407 is an eggplant—any more than any set of perceptual observations could.

What can you believe?

Blue socks

Blue socks, courtesy↗︎︎ Rosie Fraser

Philosophers use the word “proposition” to designate whatever is the sort of thing one believes or disbelieves, or that could be true or false. They can’t say what sort of thing that is, though, or how one would work.

This is a serious problem for rationalism↗︎︎. If “what kinds of thing are beliefs and truths?” sounds to you like ivory-tower metaphysics, of no practical consequence, I mostly agree. However, rationalist epistemology↗︎︎ depends on the conviction that some answer is possible.

What we’ve seen so far suggests otherwise. The sorts of things that could be true or believable in an everyday sense—sentences like “the eggplant is purple”—can’t be true or believable in a rationalist sense, because they have no definite meaning. Natural language is too vague. Formal logic attempted to fix that, but could eliminate only some syntactic ambiguities. Mathematical equations, such as laws of physics, might be adequately true or believable, but don’t seem capable of expressing most facts about the eggplant-sized world.

Propositions would have to somehow overcome nebulosity, while retaining the expressive power of natural language. Most philosophers would admit no one has a clue how that could work.

Further, philosophers mainly agree that propositions would have to be mind-independent non-physical objects that are entangled with the physical world:

  • It was true that Pluto’s mass was approximately 1.3 × 1022 kilograms before there was anyone to believe it. Where was that truth?
  • Propositions are not physical properties of the objects they refer to. Someone might believe that unicorns can fly, even though there are no unicorns.
  • Physical things can’t be true or false. If a museum specimen is mislabeled, the paper label isn’t false; it’s just atoms. What’s false is the label’s claim, which is not a physical property of the label.
  • If you and I both believe snow is white, we believe the same proposition. If you are a German speaker, you might think “Schnee ist weiss,” and that would express the same belief as my “snow is white.” Apparently propositions don’t live in our heads, and aren’t properties of individuals.
  • Some neurons representing the proposition might be in your head, and it might be that your having neurons in some particular state constitutes believing snow is white. But the believing is not the thing believed. Neural states, like museum labels, can’t be true or false.

The correspondence theory of truth postulates a connection (correspondence) between physical brains and physical states of affairs. The nature of the connection is mysterious, but at least the two ends are grounded in physical reality. Rationalist theories attempt to solve the mystery by introducing a third sort of entity, propositions, that sit between brains and the world. But this replaces one mysterious connection with two, each somehow bridging between a physical thing and a non-physical thing:

“Believing” arrow from thing-in-head to proposition-in-Platonic-realm; “about” arrow from proposition to thing-in-world

I do believe I’ll replace this hastily hand-drawn diagram with a better one some day.

What work are the propositions doing? If they have no causal role in reasoning, they’re useless. If they do play a causal role, how can physical and non-physical things interact?1

Propositions are spooks, like banshees or angels. No one has ever captured one on camera, or in a zoo. Mind-independent non-physical entities with causal effects: phantoms, specters, apparitions… Rationalism was practically invented to get rid of them!

Why does this matter? Rationalism supposes that there are definite things that you believe; propositions are just whatever those are. But it appears that nothing could play that role. If we accept that the idea of propositions is incoherent—that there is nothing that could be believed or true in the rationalist sense—then we have to abandon the rationalist models for belief and truth.2

We’ve already seen that truths are generally nebulous: only sort-of true. Parts Two and Four discuss the nebulosity of belief as well: to varying degrees, what we believe is nebulous, and how we believe it is also nebulous. And just as truths are sort-of true in different ways, believing that God Is Love has to be understood quite differently from believing that you are wearing blue socks.

  • 1. Naturally, philosophers try to come up with work-arounds for all these issues. The Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyPropositions↗︎︎” article demonstrates how difficult the problems are, and how convoluted the responses; and in the end it boils down to “not the ghost of a rumor of a clue.”
  • 2. “One person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens.” In other words, the rationalist conception of belief leads to contradictions, so it must be wrong.

Where did you get that idea in the first place?

Edison light bulb patent

Rationalist↗︎︎ epistemology↗︎︎ mainly asks “how do you decide what to believe, given a set of possible beliefs?” It usually leaves unasked the question “where did those alternatives come from?” Meta-rationalism↗︎︎ sees that as a major missing piece in the rationalist story.

There are two aspects to finding things you might come to believe.

  • First, you have to describe your situation in terms of some vocabulary or ontology↗︎︎. There are unenumerably many possible ways of characterizing a situation, none of them “correct.” When rationalism considers “hypothesis generation” as a problem (which is rarely), it assumes a fixed vocabulary.1

  • Second, even given an ontology, the number of candidate beliefs within it is infinite. How do you choose which to even consider?2

Many rationalist theorists explicitly state that inventing new ideas, theories, and hypotheses is inherently non-rational, and cannot be analyzed rationally. This has been the mainstream position in the philosophy of science, for example. That field distinguishes the context of justification from the context of discovery. Justification is a “rational reconstruction” that explains why we ought to believe the thing that was discovered. The scientific discovery process itself is considered to be a matter of “intuition,” “creativity” or “genius”; a “eureka moment” that many rationalist philosophers have explicitly termed “irrational,” “mysterious,” or even “mystical.” It cannot be analyzed rationally, and is therefore a matter only for mute veneration.3

The meta-rational↗︎︎ view agrees that developing vocabularies, choosing hypotheses, and scientific discovery are partly non-rational. Specifically, they are meta-rational. But meta-rationalism is not satisfied with thought-stopping terms like “intuition” or “creativity.”

Parts Four and Five of The Eggplant explain that we can investigate and at least partially understand invention, innovation, and scientific discovery as meta-rational processes; and doing so is useful. They cannot be fully articulated, but that doesn’t mean we should say nothing at all.

  • 1. See Alexandre Linhares’ “A glimpse at the metaphysics of Bongard problems↗︎︎,” Artificial Intelligence 121 (2000) pp. 251–270.
  • 2. As a footnote in “Rationalism’s responses to trouble” observed, rationalists sometimes suggest enumerating all possible hypotheses systematically, and interleaving that process with collecting evidence. This Solomonoff induction is elegant as mathematics, but spectacularly impractical. In a strong mathematical sense, it is the most uncomputable process there can be. It is irrelevant to rationality in the real world.
  • 3. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Scientific Discovery↗︎︎.” Fortunately, recent philosophy of science increasingly incorporates theories of creativity, and is more willing to ask how discovery happens.

The Spanish Inquisition

Rationality is supposed to enable you to infer new things from what you already know. For example, you know that you can use rowboats to cross rivers, so if you know there’s a specific rowboat on a specific river, you should be able to conclude that you can cross.

While it is usually true that you can use a rowboat to cross a river, it is not true if you can’t find the oars, if there is a hole in the bottom, if it is locked to the dock and you don’t have a key, if you have a broken arm, if your section of the river is powerful whitewater leading to a fatal waterfall, if it is infested with hungry hippos, or if it is a contested national border patrolled by helicopters with shoot-on-sight orders.

There are hardly any universal absolute truths about the eggplant-sized world. Nearly every piece of general knowledge has exceptions. Nearly anything might be relevant to nearly anything else—although nearly everything turns out to be pretty well irrelevant in any specific case.

If you knew, before getting to the river, that the rowboat is in good working order, that the river is safe for boating, and so on, you could conclude that crossing would be possible. However, you cannot be certain until you get there and see. This defeats standard formal logic. Absolute-truth-preserving deduction is impossible in the face of ignorance about any factors that might be relevant.

You might instead be able to reason probabilistically about “known unknowns”—obstacles that you could, realistically, anticipate and assign probabilities to. You could not, realistically, anticipate “unknown unknowns,” for instance that someone has filled your boat with electric eels, although it is logically possible that they did. This defeats probabilism (as we’ll see later).

Unknown unknowns are unenumerable. The rowboat example comes from John McCarthy, one of the founders of artificial intelligence research. He devoted his career to addressing the problem, using non-standard extensions to formal logic. He wrote:

In order to fully represent the conditions for the successful performance of an action, an impractical and implausible number of qualifications would have to be included in the sentences expressing them… yet anyone will still be able to think of additional requirements not yet stated.1

This problem is fatal for rationalism’s hope of a correctness or optimality guarantee for inference in the eggplant-sized world.

Obviously, though, we do use rational inference successfully all the time. How? Three ways:

  • We can make a closed-world idealization by pretending we know what all the relevant factors are, and we may get away with it
  • We can re-engineer the world to more nearly fit the idealization by manufacturing less-nebulous objects and by shielding them from unexpected influences
  • We can reality-check the necessarily-unreliable results of rational inference

All three of these are meta-rational operations. They can be done badly or well. Typically they are not thought through carefully, because meta-rationality is generally overlooked. I’ll discuss the first two in Part Three on how rationality works in practice, and the last in Part Four on meta-rationality.

Alternatively… the reasonable thing to do is cross the river when you come to it. When you get there, you can look to see whether you can use the boat. Problems you could not reasonably have anticipated will be visible. If three cardinals of the Spanish Inquisition pop in to inform you that rowing is a sin punishable by the rack, you can probably find some alternative.

The reasonable “deal with it when the time comes” approach can sometimes lead you to painting yourself into a corner. Rationality is especially valuable when such mistakes are costly or likely.

  • 1. John McCarthy, “Circumscription—A Form of Non-Monotonic Reasoning,” Artificial Intelligence 13 (1980), pp. 27-39.

Probabilism

Probability theory may seem an attractive candidate for the foundation of rationality↗︎︎:

  • Whereas formal logic is rarely useful in practice, probabilistic methods are indispensable in many technical fields
  • Probability theory recognizes that absolute certainty is never possible in the eggplant-size world
  • It provides an intuitively appealing account of greater and lesser confidence in beliefs.

Each of these addresses fatal problems in logicism↗︎︎. Let’s say probabilism is any rationalism↗︎︎ that takes probabilistic rationality as central to rationality overall. By that I mean probability theory (the basic mathematics of chance), plus decision theory (a story about how you should act based on the probability of desirable outcomes), plus statistical methods.

Probabilism mostly replaced logicism as the dominant form of rationalism in the mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately:

  • Probability theory lacks most of formal logic’s power
  • Probabilism does not even try to address most of the issues that logicism failed at, and so also fails for the same reasons
  • Probabilism’s defects are not just theoretical; they regularly produce large practical catastrophes.

From the meta-rational↗︎︎ point of view, probabilism is wrong. However, probabilistic methods should be part of the toolkit of every rational person. Probabilistic meta-rationality↗︎︎ means knowing when and why and how to use those methods effectively.

Weaker and stronger probabilisms

Here are some claims about the power of probabilistic rationality, in order from weaker to stronger:

  1. Probabilistic rationality is extremely valuable in some situations; use it when appropriate
  2. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of induction
  3. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of uncertainty
  4. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of epistemology
  5. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of rationality
  6. Probabilistic rationality applies in all circumstances; use it always

Claim 1 is true. The rest are false. Let’s take them in reverse order.

Claims 5 and 6 can be disposed of quickly. Probabilistic rationality does not include most of mathematics; how could it be a complete theory of rationality?1 Writing a software procedure to meet a given specification is a rational activity; usually it does not involve probabilistic reasoning at all. Theoretical physics is taken as the foremost example of rationality in science; differential equations are the main tool in theoretical physics; differential equations are not part of probability theory. Probability theory can be combined with differential equations, but that doesn’t make it a complete theory of rationality, any more than calculus is a complete theory of rationality.

As an epistemology↗︎︎ (claim 4), probabilism looks like this:2

Sentence Confidence Truth
Alain is bald 0.7384261 True
Ludwig has fed the dog 0.8729682 True
Immanuel has woken from his slumber 0.6260485 False
Self-consciousness recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive; or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same, i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. 0.2195923 True

This illustrates probabilism’s sharing most of the problems that defeat logicism:

  • It requires that all beliefs are either absolutely true or absolutely false of the world. (Otherwise, the math doesn’t work.)
  • It does not address any of the representational problems (ambiguity, vagueness, definitions, reference, propositions).
  • It does not address any of the ontological problems (the nebulosity↗︎︎ of objects, categories, properties, and relationships).
  • Among logicism’s epistemological failings, probabilism addresses only uncertainty about known unknowns (not unknown unknowns, relevance, new ideas, or most issues in perception).

Probabilism simply ignores most of the issues logicism addressed. It doesn’t just have most of the same defects, it also doesn’t have most logic’s strengths. It’s a much weaker system in terms of expressive power (what it allows you to say) and inferential power (what you can conclude from a set of givens).3 The whole of mathematics is pretty much contained within logic; the same is not true for probability theory.

As a theory of uncertainty (claim 3), probabilistic rationality addresses only certain types of known unknowns. It can fail catastrophically when it encounters unknown unknowns, or known unknowns that don’t play fair. I’ll discuss that in following chapters.

Probabilism is most nearly convincing as a theory of scientific induction (claim 2). How much evidence should make you how confident about a scientific theory? Statistics can give strong guidance in many cases. However, we’ll see that statistics can’t answer the question outright, and can be powerfully misleading as well. (Also, much of science isn’t based on probability at all. Isaac Newton did some pretty decent work without it. Science rarely used statistical methods before the middle of the twentieth century.)

Probabilists may implicitly assume that induction is the only significant problem in epistemology or rationality—in which case claims 4 and 5 would be more plausible. Some reasons one could imagine induction is the main issue:

  • The collapse of logical positivism was widely attributed to its failure to produce a workable theory of induction. That diagnosis ignored all the other difficulties it ran into.

  • Science is often misunderstood as the process of deriving universal knowledge from data. This mistakenly neglects questions of where data comes from—the importance and complexity of experiment design, of instrument development and observational practices—and also the invention of new models and theories.

  • Induction is a constant hassle for scientists in practice (“how much more data do I have to collect before I’m allowed to publish?”). Scientists can usually work around the other problems faced by rationalism by applying reasonableness↗︎︎. (That is the main point of Part Three.) Reasonableness, however, is famously bad at estimating degrees of confidence in beliefs.

No alternative?

When critics point out that probabilism does not provide an adequate account of induction, probabilists often reply that there is no credible alternative. Having trounced logicism, probabilism is the last man standing.4 It has to be right, or rationality would be impossible.

The unthought assumption is that rationality requires rationalism. That is, we can’t do rationality without a proof from first principles that being rational is correct. But we do do rationality, often successfully, and we don’t have a proof.

Similarly, rationalism assumes that we couldn’t trust scientific knowledge without a first-principles proof that induction works. For that, induction would probably need to be a universally applicable procedure with a uniform justification, such as the mathematics of probability. Probability doesn’t work for that, and there is no other credible candidate; so why should we trust scientific beliefs?

Well, how do scientists derive general knowledge from specific data? Parts Three through Five of The Eggplant develop an alternative answer. In sum, if you investigate this as an empirical question instead of a philosophical one, you find that there is no uniform principle of induction. Instead, different sciences have different ways of finding different sorts of truths, all of which are reasonably (but imperfectly) reliable when used well. Some use probability; some don’t.

  • 1. Some rationalists simply define “rational” as “conforming to decision theory,” in which case probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of rationality by definition. But this does not line up with how “rational” is used by most scientists or engineers.
  • 2. This is a “Bayesian” presentation of probabilism. Bayesianism is one of the major schools of probabilistic rationalism; “frequentism” is another, and its epistemology is rather different. I believe the same general critique applies to all probabilisms, but explaining why all versions fail would involve different details for each. That would be tedious, so mostly the discussion here uses only Bayesian language.
  • 3. See my “Probability theory does not extend logic” on the Meaningness website.
  • 4. Bayes or Bust↗︎︎, as one author put it, referring to the Bayesian version of probabilism. There are other minor rationalisms, third alternatives; but they too have fatal flaws, and fewer success stories.

Leaving the casino

Casino interior

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Francesco Ungaro

Probabilistic rationality was originally invented to choose optimal strategies in betting games. It’s perfect for that—and less perfect for other things.

If a game is fair, you have perfect knowledge of:

  • everything you and the other players can do (a small number of different types of actions)
  • everything that can happen as a result (a small number of different types of outcomes)
  • how much you will win or lose in every possible outcome (payoffs).

Also, you can estimate how probable each outcome is based on how the game has gone so far, if this is not a given.

Probabilistic rationality is the absolutely correct way to think and act if you are in a fair betting game. This is true only by definition. That is what it now means for a betting game to be fair. Betting games have evolved to conform to the gradually developing understanding of probability theory. For instance, for many centuries dice did not have equal probabilities for each side. It was not understood how important that was, because the idea of “probability” hadn’t yet been invented.1

The actions, outcomes, and payoffs postulated by probability theory are abstract mathematical entities. Formally, the domain of applicability of probabilistic rationality is restricted to formal systems that conform to the probability axioms. This includes nothing in the eggplant-sized world (although actual casinos come close).

There are no objective criteria for what counts as an action, outcome, or payoff in reality. These are not found in fundamental physics, nor are they reducible to it. In the eggplant-sized world, they are nebulous↗︎︎ entities—more so than many. Consequently, probability theory, in application, is never an absolute truth. It is a metaphor, model, or way of seeing. Those are neither true nor false; they can only be useful, or not, in different circumstances.

So, to make effective use of probabilistic rationality, you decide to pretend that whatever you are doing is a betting game, and see where that leads you. Often, in a concrete situation, there are several different, plausible ontologies↗︎︎ of actions, outcomes, and payoffs. You have to choose one. The quality of your conclusions will depend on your meta-rational↗︎︎ skill in doing so.

Often, the framework doesn’t meaningfully apply at all. What are all the things you could do next week? The possibilities are unenumerable. What outcomes might each have? In most cases, you cannot even imagine them all, much less estimate probabilities or payoffs.

Grand Place, Brussels

The old central market, Brussels. Image courtesy↗︎︎ Vase Petrovski

Advocates of probability as a general theory of rationality invoke the “Dutch Book Argument↗︎︎”: if someone forces you to treat a situation as a fair betting game, it would be irrational not to think and act according to probabilistic decision theory. That is true—by definition. Fortunately, in 1789, the Count of Flanders eradicated the scourge of roving Bayesian Thugs who forced fair bets on random citizens at swordpoint. Many were hanged in the Brussels central market.2

What sort of world would probabilistic rationalism be true of? One that was a single vast casino. For the probabilist, existence as a whole is a gigantic Bayesian Thug. Looking at things this way tends to cause paranoia, hyperactivity, exhaustion, and nihilistic depression—as we’ll see.

  • 1. Better dice are an example of the theme of our engineering reality to fit rationality, rather than accommodating rationality to reality. Still, players must agree to ignore tiny imperfections in the dice, and declare that the game is fair by fiat. If all players do agree, and are not deceived about circumstances, then the game is fair as a social fact—not, in the end, as a physical or mathematical one. For a general history of early probability theory, see Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability↗︎︎. On irregular dice, J. W. Eerkens & A. de Voogt, “The Evolution of Cubic Dice↗︎︎,” Acta Archaeologica, 88:1 (2017), pp. 163–173.
  • 2. A “Bayesian” is a species of probabilist. The Bayesian Elimination Decree of 1789 is just my joke—in case you wondered.

What probability can’t do

Bank run

The run on Northern Rock, first bank to fail in the Great Financial Crisis. Image courtesy↗︎︎ Lee Jordan

If probability theory actually was an epistemology↗︎︎, what would we want it do?

What we’d want would be a method that, given a set of observations and a candidate belief, tells us how strongly we should believe it. That would be a solution to the problem of induction.1 Probabilists assume that such a method must exist—although different schools of probabilists believe in different methods.

The method should be mechanical or mindless, in the sense that it requires no fallible human judgement. This might make a guarantee possible: if you push your data through the process, it will tell you the mathematically correct degree of confidence you should have in your candidate belief. Probabilism recognizes that certainty about specific beliefs is impossible, but still promises certainty that its results are optimal.

Unfortunately, no mathematical method can reliably tell you how confident you should be in a belief; the desired guarantee is impossible. Further, the belief that such methods and guarantees do exist has been a major cause of the 2008 financial crisis and the science replication crisis, among other catastrophes.

If you use probabilistic methods in your professional practice, you have a moral responsibility to understand how and when and why they work—and how and when and why they don’t—to avoid such failures. The stakes are high. Millions of people have died due to probabilistic rationality not having been used where it should have been, in public health and medical decision making. Trillions of dollars—equivalent to millions of people’s entire working lives—have been wasted due to using probabilistic rationality where it should not have been, in financial market modeling.

Unfortunately, understanding when to use probabilistic rationality is uncommon. Rationalist assurances that it is always the right tool in situations of uncertainty are largely to blame.

So… why doesn’t probabilistic rationality always work? In short, because the world is not a casino.

There are a couple dozen different ways most situations are unlike casinos, each of which makes probabilistic rationality inapplicable in a different way. Any one of these is fatal to probabilism as a general theory of rationality.

The next chapter sketches, intuitively, one reason no probabilistic method could work as desired. It’s the simplest and most important one: possible actions and outcomes are nebulous↗︎︎ and unenumerable, so the formalism simply does not apply in most real-world situations.

Then the following chapter explains the science replication crisis as partly a consequence of probabilism.

But, we can come to a happier understanding if we turn the question around. Why does probabilistic rationality sometimes work, even though it is never formally applicable in the eggplant-sized world?

Skilled meta-rational↗︎︎ use of probabilistic methods requires considering whether and how a situation is enough like a casino. If you judge it is, you need to take the specifics of the similarities and dissimilarities into account in your use of a probabilistic model. Part Five includes a chapter on such meta-rational probabilistic and statistical practice.

Footnote for rationalists

This chapter was supposed to be about “what probability can’t do,” but you haven’t given even one specific example! This is a lot of words—just philosophical hot air. You can’t prove probability theory is wrong, because it’s just math. It’s just true; you can’t argue with math!

Probability theory is just math, but probabilism isn’t. Probabilism is about applying the math to understand eggplant-scale, real-world situations.2 The math is fine; it’s the application that won’t always work. In fact, no application is exactly right, because you can never specify everything that might happen.

Demanding “a specific example” misses the point: everything is an example. However, Leonard Savage, founder of the Subjective Bayesian school of statistics, provided one. He said that using probabilistic methods to plan a picnic would be “utterly ridiculous,” because the set of possible consequences of actions cannot be known in advance.3

Probabilists offer several supposed proofs that probability theory is guaranteed to be right. These are mathematically correct but mostly irrelevant to real-world problems of induction. The most common ones are the Dutch Book Argument and Cox’s Theorem.

  • The Dutch Book Argument shows that if a formal system conforms to axioms describing fair betting games, then the bets that probabilistic rationality recommends are optimal.4 This is irrelevant except in situations you judge are similar enough to a formally fair betting game.
  • Cox’s Theorem says that there is no formal system other than probability theory that is very similar to it; so if you want something like that, you’ve only got one choice. (See the section on Cox’s Theorem in my “Probability theory does not extend logic” for discussion.) This is relevant only if you are considering using one of the dubious alternatives↗︎︎, none of which seems to work as well in practice.

I mentioned that there are “a couple dozen” fatal flaws in probabilism. I have not found any unified, comprehensive survey of these.

  • Bayes: a kinda-sorta masterpost↗︎︎,” an internet essay by “Nostalgebraist,” explains clearly some of the failings I consider most important.
  • The “Potential Problems” section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Bayesian Epistemology↗︎︎” covers eight briefly.
  • John Earman’s Bayes or Bust?↗︎︎ covers several arguments for and against. He concludes that probabilism doesn’t work and can’t be fixed, but that alternative theories of induction are even worse.
  • Nicholas Nassim Taleb has written several books about the mistaken assumption that reality is a casino, which he calls the “ludic fallacy↗︎︎.”

Most critics of probabilism analyze a single defect. Probably no one has collected a full list because there’s so many of them; because each takes several pages to explain well; and because if you want to argue against probabilism as a general theory of induction, epistemology, or rationality, a single conclusive argument seems sufficient.

Individual fatal flaws do not seem to deter probabilists, however. A comprehensive collection of failure modes might be more convincing. However, most objections to probabilism are well-known to its leading proponents, and they have devised conceptual work-arounds, technical add-ons, or philosophical counter-arguments for many of them. I find these individually weak, and it’s hard to imagine that they could all be combined into a single adequate system.

Nevertheless, this dispute gets ferociously complex. It’s further complicated by the fact that there is no single widely-accepted version of probabilism. There are several schools, all of whom agree that probabilism must be right overall, and also that the other schools are doing it wrong. Different schools take different approaches to addressing objections, so a comprehensive collection of arguments that no probabilistic rationalism could work would need to explain why each such response is inadequate.

As I observed in “Rationalism’s responses to trouble”:

Eventually one just has to say “This contraption has gotten awfully complicated, and mostly doesn’t seem to work in practice. Perhaps you will be able fix it someday with even more machinery, but that seems increasingly unlikely. And we do have a better alternative!”

  • 1. Or maybe half of a solution to the real-life problem of induction. The other half is: where do these candidate beliefs come from? In probabilism, as in rationalism generally, no one asks.
  • 2. Fundamental physics, at the quantum scale, is more-or-less probabilistic, and non-nebulous. However, quantum randomness only manifests at the eggplant scale under unusual circumstances.
  • 3. Leonard Savage, The Foundations of Statistics↗︎︎ (1954), p. 16.
  • 4. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s Dutch Book article↗︎︎ gives a good overview.

The probability of green cheese

Recall McCarthy’s rowboat problem. Usually you can use one to cross a river. But, when you get there, you might discover it’s impossible due to an unexpected infestation of inquisitors.

You could interpret “it’s usually true that you can use a rowboat to cross a river” as “it’s probably true,” in the technical sense according to which “probably” means you assign it a number between zero and one. How?

The mathematics of probability starts from a specified set of possible “outcomes.” The probabilities of all outcomes must add up to 1.0 (or else the math doesn’t work at all). You could treat “I can cross the river” as an outcome, and assign it some probability somehow,1 like maybe 0.9.

So what’s the probability of a missing oar? I don’t know, 0.01 maybe? Hole in the boat? Same-ish? Breaking an arm? Less probable: say 0.001. Electric eels? Ebola epidemic? Invasion of space aliens?

The problem I want to point at is not that this exercise adds up a list of pretty meaningless numbers to get an even more meaningless one—although that does seem to make probabilistic reasoning useless here.

The problem is that there are unenumerable unknowns. Unlike in a formal game, you can’t make a full list of possible outcomes. There are always more things that might happen. If you add up your estimated probabilities, you’ll eventually exceed 1.0.2 Alternatively, if you quit before running out of ideas, you will have underestimated the total probability of failure.

And these are just known unknowns. There are also possibilities no one would ever think of, because we don’t know everything about how the world works.

So, a sensible strategy is to lump all outcomes you haven’t thought of as “something else happens,” and estimate the probability of that. This is very like the logicist closed-world idealization approach: you just pretend you have made a complete list, and proceed. In statistics, this is called a “small-world idealization.”3

Using probabilistic rationality in the eggplant-sized world always requires a small-world idealization. By excluding an unknown set of unaccounted-for factors, that always risks making the analysis so wrong that it is worse than useless. The “other” category is, actually, a probabilistic model of the entire rest of the universe.4

If you use a rowboat regularly, your probability estimates from experience may be good enough for the job. Science explores realms unknown and un-understood. Initial probability estimates must often be meaningless, by definition.

Here one may reasonably ask why we are in the business of “estimating” probabilities at all. That’s inherently subjective and unscientific. Can’t we just let the data do the talking? As we make more and more observations, we’ll get increasingly accurate probabilities. Statistical methods can tell us how close to the true values they are. Everyone learned this in high school science class.

This line of thinking is disastrously wrong, as the next chapter explains. Let’s do a thought-experiment first, to get the intuition.

Suppose you are an astronomer in charge of a telescope with an extra-fancy spectrometer. You arrive at work one evening, and read an email from a colleague on a different continent: “We’ve just seen something really odd in lunar crater X9-PDQ-17b. Some kind of explosion; can’t make any sense of it. Could you check it out with your spectrometer asap?” So you look up the coordinates of X9-PDQ-17b—which turns out to be dinky, only a few dozen meters across—and you tell the telescope to look there.

A spectrometer breaks light down into its constituent wavelengths: a spectrum, as with a prism. A wavelength corresponds to a pure color. Sunlight is a mixture of many. Particular materials—such as rocks on the moon—reflect different percentages of incoming sunlight at different wavelengths. This gives each a unique “signature.” A spectrometer measures precisely how bright incoming light is at each wavelength.

Your spectrometer is at the optical focus of the telescope, so it tells you what you are looking at. Its software consults a large public database of spectra of all sorts of materials. Each entry says what the material is, and how much it reflects each wavelength. Entries are uploaded by expert spectroscopists, who have rigorously calibrated their instruments, and made and cross-checked many measurements.

Typically, an observed spectrum doesn’t precisely match anything in the database. Using a statistical algorithm, the software calculates how nearly it fits every entry, and then tells you how confident you can be that you are looking at, for example, olivine, ilmenite, or anorthosite—typical moon rocks.5

So now it’s finished its measurement of X9-PDQ-17b, and says “green cheese, with probability 0.9837.”

What should you believe is the probability that X9-PDQ-17b is made out of cheese?

Very large amounts of data, plus a sophisticated, widely-used, carefully validated statistical algorithm, say it’s 0.9837. Do you believe that?

No? Why not? If you think the probability is very nearly zero—how come?

It occurs to you that the telescope was cleaned during the daytime today, before you came in. Maybe the cleaner had a green cheese sandwich for lunch, and a crumb fell onto a lens? Green cheese in the spectrometer seems way more likely than green cheese in X9-PDQ-17b.

The spectrometer’s probability estimate implicitly relies on a small-world idealization that excludes unenumerable ways data may not tell you what it usually does. “There’s no extraneous matter in the light path” is a usualness condition that the software doesn’t take into account. What is the probability of there being green cheese on a lens? Who knows; you couldn’t get a meaningful estimate. It’s meant to be excluded by shielding—the spectrometer is enclosed in a metal box—but maybe its shutter was mistakenly left open during cleaning.

On the other hand… it would be an odd coincidence for your colleague to have sent you an urgent email just at the same time the usualness condition was violated. “Oh, of course!” you realize. “It’s April Fools’ Day. Somehow every year I forget, and get taken in by something.” Someone on your team must have altered the software to say “green cheese,” and colluded with the foreign colleague to pull your leg. Now it seems that the probability of green cheese on the moon or on a lens is slight.

But then… you remember that, driving up the mountain to the telescope, you were listening to the radio; and there was an interview with a spokesperson from the Chinese space agency, who said that Western scientists should expect a “special surprise,” demonstrating new Chinese capabilities.

“OMG!” you think. “Could they have?… Surely not… But what an brilliant prank if they did! Explode a green cheese bomb, scattering a thin film of the material across the crater? As an April Fools’ joke?”

Now what do you think the probability of green cheese in X9-PDQ-17b is? Maybe the spectrometer was right! It’s hard to put a meaningful number on the probability, but it seems more likely than green cheese having fallen out of someone’s sandwich.

So, why did you not believe the 0.9837 estimate in the first place? Because you know that the moon is not made out of green cheese; and because you know that small-world idealizations can fail.

A meta-rational↗︎︎ approach to probability considers the specifics of the idealization, asking whether it’s sensible; and frequently reality-checks the conclusions of probabilistic inferences, because there can be no guarantee that they aren’t wildly wrong.

  • 1. In general, “assigning some probability somehow” is called the problem of the priors. There doesn’t seem to be any way of doing it that is both rationally justifiable and practically feasible. Most probabilists acknowledge this, but claim it isn’t a big deal in practice. Many skeptics consider it a fatal flaw. I think it’s fatal for probabilism as an absolute, universal theory, while agreeing that in many practical cases it’s not a big deal. Meta-rational↗︎︎ probabilistic practice entails figuring out whether choosing priors is fatally impossible in a specific case, or easy, or if the problems caused by bad priors can be worked around due to particular features of the situation.
  • 2. Technically, you could avoid this by assigning possible outcomes successively smaller probabilities that converge asymptotically to a limit less than 1.0. This artificial procedure would not produce justifiable priors, and I don’t know of anyone advocating it.
  • 3. This term is due to Leonard Savage, one of the founders of statistical theory, in particular the “subjective Bayesian” school. He wrote that using probabilistic methods to plan a picnic would be “utterly ridiculous,” because the set of possible consequences of actions cannot be known in advance. (The Foundations of Statistics↗︎︎, p. 16.) He suggested that selection of small-world idealizations “may be a matter of judgement and experience about which it is impossible to enunciate complete and sharply defined general principles”—a fine statement of the non-rationality of meta-rationality!
  • 4. Or, more precisely, of everything within a light cone. (You could be prevented from crossing the river by the arrival of the first gamma rays from a supernova.) I’ve presented this in Bayesian terms, but the problem affects frequentism equally, in a slightly different form. A frequentist statistical model is an account of “the data generating process.” Inasmuch as its predictions would be upset by a supernova, that too is implicitly a model of the whole universe.
  • 5. I have no idea whether spectrometry software works like this. We’re in thought-experiment land here, so it doesn’t matter.

Statistics and the replication crisis

If probabilism were just a mistaken philosophical theory, it wouldn’t matter. Philosophy has a million silly theories.1 Most are harmless, because no one takes them seriously.2

Probabilism being wrong matters because science and engineering and education and medicine and finance and government matter to everyone’s lives, and statistical methods are widely used in all those fields. When probabilism—misplaced faith in probabilistic methods—leads you to ignore nebulosity↗︎︎, catastrophes result.

I’ll use the science replication crisis as an example, although parallel analyses apply to financial crises and policy disasters—as well as less dramatic everyday business and government failures.

Science works, it’s based on probability, therefore probability works, therefore any objections to probabilism must be arcane philosophical nit-picking, which we can ignore in practice.

But science doesn’t work, most of the time, even. The replication crisis consists of the realization that, in many sciences, most of what had been believed, based on statistical analyses, was actually false.3 Fortunately, some scientists have taken this seriously and formed a replication movement, or credibility revolution, to address the problem.4

The deep causes of the crisis are bad incentives: institutions reward activities that led to false scientific conclusions, and do not reward—or even actively punish—activities that can correct them. However, the substance of the crisis is largely “doing statistics wrong.”

You can “do statistics wrong” at three levels:

  1. Making errors in calculations within a formal system
  2. Misunderstanding what could be concluded within the system if your small-world idealization↗︎︎ held
  3. Not realizing you have made a small-world idealization, and taking it as Truth.

Statistics is taught as a collection of complex, difficult calculation methods. If you have struggled through a stats course, when you hear “doing statistics wrong,” the natural assumption is that scientists have made sloppy mistakes like misplaced minus signs or putting data in the wrong column. The replication movement has found that these level-one errors are, indeed, far too common.

If that were the whole problem, fixing it by requiring more checking would be straightforward.5 Unfortunately, the other two levels, and the necessary fixes, are more subtle.

Second level mistakes are misunderstandings of what statistical methods can do. What scientists want is a mathematically guaranteed general solution to the problem of induction. That would let you gain knowledge through a mindless mechanical procedure, without necessarily understanding the domain. You could feed a hypothesis and a bunch of measurements into a black box, and it would tell you how much you should believe the hypothesis. It would be objective, avoiding fallible human judgement. Also, conveniently, you wouldn’t have to think. Especially, you wouldn’t have to understand statistics, a boring and difficult field that just gets in the way of doing interesting lab work.6 In fact, no magic box can relieve you of the necessity of figuring out for yourself what (if anything) your data are telling you. But for half a century, many scientists assumed there was one, which is a main reason so much science is wrong.

The famous example is the P<0.05 criterion in null hypothesis significance testing. This has been the main statistical tool in many sciences for many decades. Software packages make it easy to compute; they do not make it understandable or meaningful. Scientists generally treat the analysis as an inscrutable oracle that tells you whether you should believe a theory—and whether or not you can publish.

What you would like P<0.05 to mean is that your theory has less than a 5% chance of being false; you can have a 0.95 confidence that it is correct. Unfortunately, it does not mean that. The P value doesn’t tell you anything about how confident you should be. In common cases your P<0.05 theory is more likely false than true.7

Few scientists understand P values. A recent paper explains eighteen different wrong ideas about what P<0.05 means, each common in peer-reviewed scientific papers.8 Confusion is understandable, because what the P value does tell you is both quite difficult to understand and something you almost certainly don’t care about. Confusion is not altogether the fault of individual scientists: the explanations of P values in statistics courses are often subtly wrong. It’s also reasonable to assume P values must tell you something useful (or else why would your professor have taught them to you?). It’s therefore reasonable to assume that they tell you the thing that you want and that sounds pretty much like the explanation you’ve read.

It’s tempting to think these misconceptions can and should be fixed with better statistical education. But emphasizing correct understanding of P values, including that they are usually irrelevant to scientific questions, would beg the question of what scientists should do instead.

Those who recognize this often assume that we somehow just chose the wrong black box. If P values are the wrong method, what should we use? If probabilism has the solution to the problem of induction—what is it?

Some reformers have advocated particular alternatives: confidence intervals or Bayes factors, for example. Unfortunately, each of these has its own problems. None of them can, by itself, tell you what you should believe. Any of them—including P values—can be a valuable tool in certain cases.

Why can no method tell you how confident you should be in a belief? One reason is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (No amount of data out of a spectrometer should convince you that the moon is made of green cheese.) A numerical estimate of how likely you are to be wrong requires a numerical estimate of how extraordinary your claim is. But often you can’t meaningfully quantitate that. Science explores areas where no one knows what’s going on. Good scientists have different hunches, and reasonably disagree about what’s likely.

Unfortunately, avoiding first and second level errors does not mean you will get correct answers about the real world. It only guarantees that your answers are correct about your formal small-world idealization.

Good statisticians understand the third level error: confusing formal inference with real-world truth. Conversations like this are increasingly common:

Statisticians: Your statistical reasoning is wrong. Your science is broken.

Scientists: Oh. Well, stats is confusing and not our field, so we just run the program we were taught to use in the intro course, and publish when it says it’s OK. So, what statistical test should we run instead?

Statisticians: There is no “correct” statistical test!9

Scientists: Well, tell us what arcane ritual you want us to perform to keep publishing our stuff. And can you put that in a user-friendly program, please?

Statisticians: No, you have to actually do science if you want to figure out what is going on.10

Scientists: “Do science”? What do you mean? Look, we’re scientists. For a shot at tenure, we have to get several papers published every year. How are we supposed to get our data OK’d for that now?

Your statistics package can’t do your thinking for you.11 There can’t be a general theory of induction, uncertainty, epistemology, or the rest. Too bad!

In poorly-understood domains, science requires a meta-rational↗︎︎ approach to induction: in this situation, what method will give a meaningful answer? Can we apply statistics here at all? Why or why not? If we can, what specific method would give a meaningful answer, and what do we need to do to assure that it does?

Analogously, in recent economic crises caused by misuse of statistics, the problem was not that financial economists were using statistics wrong at levels one and two (although that was also true). It’s that they were using statistics at all in a domain where it often doesn’t apply, because usualness conditions only hold temporarily; and they failed to monitor the adequacy of their idealization. In the run-up to the 2008 crisis, many financial models assumed that American housing prices could never go down country-wide—because they never had. That usualness condition was catastrophically violated.

The real-world applicability of a statistical approach is nebulous, because the real world is nebulous. Choosing a statistical method and building a statistical model always involves meta-rational judgements, based on a preliminary understanding of how the idealization relates to reality. There are no right or wrong answers (so long as you stay within the formal domain of applicability). Rather, choices can be more and less predictive, productive, or meaningful.12

There’s no substitute for obstinate curiosity, for actually figuring out what is going on; and no fixed method for that. Science can’t be reduced to any fixed method, nor evaluated by any fixed criterion. It uses methods and criteria; it is not defined or limited by them.13

Part Five of The Eggplant explains the emerging meta-rational approach to statistical practice.

  • 1. Peter Unger, “Why There Are No People↗︎︎,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979), pp. 177-222.
  • 2. Peter Unger, “I Do Not Exist↗︎︎,” in G.F. Macdonald (eds) Perception and Identity, 1979.
  • 3. John Ioannidis’ “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False↗︎︎” (PLOS Medicine 30 August 2005) lit the fuse on the replication movement. Since then, many large studies, in several different sciences, have verified that a majority of what had been believed from statistical results was false. For example, when repeating 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research, a team at Amgen was able to replicate the positive results of only six (11%). (C. Glenn Begley and Lee M. Ellis, “Raise standards for preclinical cancer research↗︎︎,” Nature, 28 March 2012.) A team led by Brian Nosek repeated a hundred psychology experiments published in prestigious journals, and found a statistically significant result in less than half. (“Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science↗︎︎,” Science, 28 August 2015, 349:6251.) A large-scale automated statistical reanalysis of papers in cognitive neuroscience, by Szucs and Ioannidis, found that more than half are likely to be false (even if experimenters did everything else right). (“Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature↗︎︎,” PLOS Biology, March 2, 2017.)
  • 4. The “replication crisis” is also called the “reproducibility” or “repeatability” or “credibility” crisis.
  • 5. Measures to fix scientific sloppiness are reasonably straightforward, but not necessarily easy, due to institutional inertia.
  • 6. Statistician Steven Goodman writes that “many scientists want only enough knowledge to run the statistical software that allows them to get their papers out quickly, and looking like all the others in their field.” In “Five ways to fix statistics↗︎︎,” Nature 28 November 2017.
  • 7. The theory-confirmation false positive risk (FPR) “depends strongly on the plausibility of the hypothesis before an experiment is done—the prior probability of there being a real effect. If this prior probability were low, say 10%, then a P value close to 0.05 would carry an FPR of 76%. To lower that risk to 5% (which is what many people still believe P < 0.05 means), the P value would need to be 0.00045.” David Colquhoun in “Five ways to fix statistics↗︎︎,” Nature 28 November 2017. Even if the prior probability is 50%, a P value just under 0.05 gives false positives 26% of the time (Colquhoun, “↗︎︎,” Royal Society Open Science, 19 November 2014). These rates are actually best-case scenarios that assume everything else has gone as right as possible. In several large-scale replication efforts, the false positive rate was found to be greater than 50%.
  • 8. Greenland, S., Senn, S.J., Rothman, K.J. et al., “Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations↗︎︎,” European Journal of Epidemiology (2016) 31: 337.
  • 9. For a technical explanation, see David Colquhoun’s “↗︎︎,” Royal Society Open Science, 6 December 2017. “Rigorous induction is impossible,” he says, because in science you can’t make meaningful estimates of prior probabilities, which dramatically affect the expected false positive rate. (As we saw earlier, this is one of the many problems fatal for probabilism.) For a popular summary, see his “The problem with p-values↗︎︎,” Aeon, 11th October 2016.
  • 10. The official statement of the American Statistical Association: “Good statistical practice, as an essential component of good scientific practice, emphasizes principles of good study design and conduct, a variety of numerical and graphical summaries of data, understanding of the phenomenon under study, interpretation of results in context, complete reporting and proper logical and quantitative understanding of what data summaries mean. No single index should substitute for scientific reasoning.” Ronald L. Wasserstein & Nicole A. Lazar (2016), “The ASA’s Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose↗︎︎, The American Statistician, 70:2, 129-133.
  • 11. McShane et al. explain why no statistical test can replace a mechanistic understanding of the domain and data generating process, in “Abandon Statistical Significance↗︎︎,” forthcoming in The American Statistician.
  • 12. See Gigerenzer and Marewski’s “Surrogate Science: The Idol of a Universal Method for Scientific Inference↗︎︎,” Journal of Management 41:2, 2015, pp. 421–440.
  • 13. As we will see later, science is done “by any means necessary.” See also my “Upgrade your cargo cult for the win.”

Acting on the truth

Dancers

Dancers courtesy↗︎︎ Jakob Owens

Rationalisms↗︎︎ are mainly concerned with thinking correctly. However, they are often also concerned with acting, and try to provide correctness or optimality guarantees for action as well.

Rationalist theories generally take action as deriving straightforwardly from your beliefs about the current state of the world and how your actions will affect it. If those beliefs are true, then you can calculate the optimal action with some simple mathematics. Four influential theories of this sort are:

  • Game theory, in which you and an opponent alternate in choosing from a small number of possible moves whose effects are fully known, in order to achieve a defined win condition
  • Decision theory, in which you choose a single action out of a small set, which will result in one of a small number of possible outcomes, but you may have only probabilistic knowledge of the world state and the outcome of your choice
  • Control theory, in which the world is taken to be a differential equation, your beliefs are values of some real-valued variables in the equation, your actions set some variables, and you aim to maximize a function of variables
  • Means-ends planning, in which you derive a program that will bring about a well-defined goal state by taking a series of discrete actions, each of which affects the world in a well-defined way.

The math in each case is conceptually trivial. This is why epistemology↗︎︎ is central for rationalism: the main thing is to make sure your beliefs are true. If you can do that, optimal action is guaranteed.

Determining action effects is hard

Although the math for choosing optimal actions is conceptually trivial, it is computationally hard. The number of computational steps required to calculate optimal actions grows exponentially (or, usually, even faster than exponentially) as the number of possible actions and outcomes increases.1 In practice, the correct computation is infeasible. Instead, heuristics are used, meaning that you consider only a small subset of possibilities. Generally heuristics are not even approximately correct, in the sense of having a numerical bound on their error. Sometimes they work well, but there’s no available analysis for how well, or for when they do or don’t work.

Further, the effects of any real-world action are subject to unenumerable unknown and potentially relevant considerations. To apply a rational action theory, you have to make a closed world idealization and ignore all but a few possibilities. A rational correctness guarantee can only be relative to the idealization; any time an unexpected factor intrudes, the guarantee fails. Relatedly, in a probabilistic framework, uncertainty may compound rapidly through a sequence of uncertain actions and outcomes. Looking a few steps into the future, predictions may become effectively meaningless.2

These rational action frameworks may work well if you can enforce a small, closed world idealization by engineering the objects in it to behave reliably and by shielding your activity from external factors. Planning is effective and essential in aircraft manufacturing, for instance. We’ll explore how this works in Part Three of The Eggplant.

Knowing that and knowing how

Routinely, we act effectively without being able to predict or even understand the effects of actions. Riding a bicycle is a standard example. Almost no one can explain how they do it, and it is quite a difficult skill to learn. The physics is counterintuitive, shockingly complex, still a subject of research, and not yet fully understood by anyone.3 Some facts are proven: for instance, to turn left, you first have to momentarily turn the wheel to the right. All bicyclists do this, but few know they do, and many would actively deny it if asked.4

So you can steer a bicycle effectively while having actively false beliefs about what you are doing and why it works, and almost no relevant knowledge of the domain. Conversely, if you did not learn to ride as a child, studied bicycle physics intensively as a graduate student, and then got on one for the first time, you would fall over many times before getting the hang of it. Your true beliefs would be nearly useless.5

Cognitive scientists make a useful distinction between knowing that, or propositional knowledge; and knowing how, or procedural knowledge. Propositional knowledge consists of true beliefs. The ability to ride a bike depends almost entirely on procedural knowledge. You know how to do it, but true beliefs are irrelevant. These two types of knowledge seem to work quite differently.

Rationalists have generally tried to reduce procedural knowledge to propositional knowledge. Some rationalists argue that the ability to ride a bicycle does consist of knowing a set of propositions about physics, it’s just that you don’t have conscious access to them. This would make for a simpler, unified epistemology, with only one type of knowing. It would also preserve hope for optimality guarantees.

This theory can’t be definitively disproven, but there is strong evidence against it. First, there is the computational complexity problem. Neurons compute shockingly slowly, and bicycling requires rapid reaction when you hit a bump. There doesn’t seem to be time enough for your brain to perform the logical deductions necessary to derive new conclusions from a propositional model.

Second, there’s extensive neuroscientific evidence that knowing-that and knowing-how are stored differently in the brain. A famous case is the patient H.M.↗︎︎ After suffering brain injury, he was unable to learn any new propositional knowledge. However, he readily learned new skills, such as solving puzzles or drawing from a mirror. Before each practice session, he would insist that he had never done anything like that before, and yet his ability steadily improved.

Coming from a rationalist point of view, you may find it difficult to imagine how it would be possible for procedural knowledge not to be reducible to propositional knowledge. Unhelpfully, we know little about how brains store know-how. Useful intuition may come from artificial intelligence. In the 1980s, my collaborator Phil Agre and I wrote a series of programs that had unambiguously zero propositional knowledge and yet carried out complex tasks in highly uncertain environments (video games).6 More recently, reinforcement learning programs have learned to play games using artificial “neural networks” in which, if there is any propositional knowledge, no one can find it.7

Rationalist theories of action are powerfully useful in certain highly-restricted sorts of situations. Overall, they are inadequate both as descriptive theories of what we do, and as normative theories of what we should do.8

Know-how is usually resistant to formal analysis, yet it can be reliably effective in practice. Part Two explains how that can be. Part Three explains how formal rationality, which deals mainly only with knowing-that, critically depends on knowing-how for support. Part Four explains how meta-rationality↗︎︎ can improve that interaction.

Not to keep you in suspense, we organize situations so that relevant factors are easily perceptible, so we can figure out what to do as we go along, so actions are likely to work, and so errors are inexpensive to repair.

Ontologies of action and of activity

Old photograph of awkward dancers

Rationalist theories mainly consider the cognitive process that leads up to “taking an action,” and have little or nothing to say about what an action is, or what it means to “take” one. Decision theory, for example, is about how to choose the best action out of a formally defined set, given a formally specified set of facts.

Then you should “take” the chosen action; but the theory doesn’t explain what “taking” consists of or entails. Implicitly, “taking” is atomic, so you can just do it, and then you are done. You don’t have to figure out the details while you are doing it. You don’t get interrupted in the middle and have to deal with other hassles concurrently. You took the action, so the “problem” is “solved.” The circumstances that led up to it, and the fact that life goes on afterward, are not considered.

In the rationalist ontology↗︎︎, action exists outside of space and time. That you are doing stuff here and now is not part of the story. This is the power of rationality: its ability to abstract and generalize. It finds universal solutions that are equally correct anywhere, and at any time. This is also its limitation: rationality is oblivious to the unenumerable specifics.

Activity is not broken down into discrete actions—although it is sometimes useful to think about it that way. “Actions” are not objective features of the world. If you could repeat the same bodily motions in a different context, that would not be the same action at all. It would almost certainly be senseless.

Part Two develops an entirely different ontology. Activity is a continuous, meaningful flow that relies intimately on the unique details of a specific situation and time. For most of what we do, improvisational partner dancing is a better prototype than placing bets in a casino.

Overcoming post-rationalist nihilism

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Realizing that rationalism↗︎︎ is wrong can be devastating, if you have built an identity around it. Post-rationalist nihilism is the loss of meaning, of self-definition, of understanding, or even of hope, in the aftermath.

Learning to master rationality↗︎︎ is an engrossing way of being. In your teens and twenties, it can absorb most of your attention and energy. It is natural to construct your identity—your understanding of your self, and the world, and how they relate—around rationality. It is also natural to take rationalism for granted as your understanding of what rationality is and how it works; and therefore what you are, and how you work.

Post-rationalist rage, anxiety, and depression can be destructive and awful. It is too common among smart, open-minded scientifically and technically educated people. Fortunately, it is not necessary.

Post-rationalist nihilism can be prevented, or cured, by recognizing that:

  1. Rationality often works. It doesn’t always work, and there are domains in which it doesn’t work at all. However, it remains immensely valuable in many. You can maintain pride that you are capable of it.
  2. Rationalism is a mistaken theory of rationality, but a better understanding is available. Meta-rationalism↗︎︎ explains how and why rationality works when it does.
  3. Applying the more accurate understanding can level up your skill in using rationality.

Part Two: Taking reasonableness seriously

Systematic rationality often works. This is unquestionably true, and important. However, the analysis in Part One suggests that rationality doesn’t work the way rationalism mistakenly supposed. It must work some other way. How?

The answer—explained in Part Three—depends on an understanding of how everyday effective thought and action (“reasonableness”) work in practice. So Part Two looks at that, as a prerequisite to Part Three’s rethinking of rationality.

Reasonableness works directly with reality, whereas rationality works with formalisms. Rationalism assumes that a formalism somehow reflects reality, and glosses over questions about how that works. In fact, in technical work, the connection is often extremely complex, but is usually ignored in theoretical explanations of how science and engineering work. (It is not ignored in practice, but this aspect of practice is overlooked in rationalist explanations.) Part Three is about how rationality depends on reasonableness to connect with reality; first we need to understand how reasonableness works on its own.

Understanding reasonableness is also a prerequisite to understanding meta-rationality. They are not the same; in Part Four, I will develop a three-way contrast between reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. (Sneak preview: meta-rationality is “reflective”—it stands outside all systems—and coordinates multiple reasonable and/or rational points of view; reasonableness does not. What’s distinctive about meta-rationality is its appropriation and altered re-use, or distinctive deployment, of rational methods, within a different overarching understanding of broader scope.)

Cross the river when you come to it

The rationalist framework overlooks contextual resources, which makes rationality artificially difficult.

Each of the problems faced by rationalism boils down to nebulosity↗︎︎ giving rise to unenumerable potentially relevant factors, which cannot be accommodated in a bounded formal framework. However, almost none of the potential complexities arise in any specific situation. Further, most of the ones which do arise turn out to be irrelevant to your purposes at the time, so you can ignore the variations they engender. You can easily see, or check, how the relevant factors play out. So the details of the actual situation you are in are generally adequate to resolve the difficulties that a general rational theory could not. You can access these details using perception and dialog.

For example:

  • In context, it’s usually easy to resolve linguistic ambiguities (both syntactic and semantic) because you can figure out what someone is trying to say based on what they are trying to accomplish and which visible aspects of the concrete situation they must be talking about. When it’s not clear, you can ask.
  • More-or-less truths can usually be resolved into “more” or “less” based on situational specifics. Whether or not a generalization applies is usually obvious.
  • Uncertainty resolves into factual outcomes that you can usually deal with when they arise. You can figure out how to cross the river when you get there.

“Usually” is important here, of course. All these resolutions are error-prone. When reasonableness goes wrong, you may need to backtrack and clean up a mess. Sometimes it is better to plan ahead. Sometimes, mere reasonableness is inadequate, and it is better to apply systematic rationality! The point of this Part, though, is that most everyday activity, including much of the work of technical professionals, is handled reasonably, and that suffices. In Part Three, we’ll see how reasonableness is a necessary support for rationality as well.

The aim of Part Two is not to give a comprehensive account of reasonableness for its own sake. That would be fascinating, but out of scope for this book. Instead, we’ll concentrate on the features of reasonableness that contribute to its role in rationality and meta-rationality—which are what The Eggplant is about.

The structure of Part Two

Part Two begins with two chapters about the sort of explanation it offers, which might not be as you’d expect. The first chapter distinguishes it from cognitive science↗︎︎; The Eggplant is not a theory of mental processing. The second explains that Part Three does not cover quite the same subject matter as rationalism, which affects the sort of understanding Part Two offers.

The middle chapters of Part Two are obviously non-philosophical (unlike rationalism and cognitive science). They explain various aspects of reasonableness: its purposefulness↗︎︎; its public accountability; the powerful uninterestingness of routine activity; and the role of perception and of linguistic communication, particularly reference.

Then, two chapters reconsider the philosophical themes of ontology and epistemology in the light of our understanding of reasonableness.

The last chapter of Part Two, on instructed activity, serves as a bridge into Part Three.

This is not cognitive science

Cognitive science is the field likely to come to mind if you think about academic studies of everyday thinking and acting. Just as Part One of The Eggplant might be mistaken for philosophy, because philosophy is the field that has mostly studied that Part’s subject matter, Part Two might at first be mistaken for cognitive science.

As we go along, it will sound less and less like cognitive science, and you might suppose that it is cognitive science done in a peculiarly bad way, presumably in order to justify false conclusions.

In fact, it is neither cognitive nor science. There is quite a lot to say about this. As a preview:

This is not about the inside of your head

Cognitivism is the view that activity is best understood in terms of mental representations and mechanisms that manipulate them, because these cause actions. Cognitivism began as an inversion of simplistic theories of behaviorism, which viewed events in the world as causing an organism’s actions in response. The Eggplant takes a third view, interactionism, which holds that causality typically rapidly crosses back and forth across the skull, as a matter of perception and action. For interactionism, understanding activity requires taking into account both environments and people. The unit of analysis for interactionism is skills, not things in the head or individual events. Skills are understood not as programs that live in your brain, but as effective patterns of interaction that extend in time and space and cross the boundaries of individuals.1

Inasmuch as rationality is a matter of action, not just thinking, a good understanding must take circumstances into account. Most rationalisms are cognitivist, and therefore mostly ignore circumstances in favor of explaining mental mechanisms. This is one reason they fail to accurately model real-world rational practice.

Going a step further, we will understand thinking itself as a mainly interactive process. In rare cases, it’s best to think while motionless with your eyes closed. Almost always, though, rational thought involves a high-frequency causal loop that crosses your skull. You work out a math problem using paper and pencil; you cannot write a program without your eyes constantly flicking back and forth across the code you’ve got on the screen.

Cognitive science aims to determine what sort of machinery is in the brain, and the mental mechanisms underlying rationality.2 The Eggplant mostly ignores these questions. No doubt there are such mechanisms, but in my view we don’t know enough about them to improve rationality much, which is the book’s aim.3

Fortunately, we don’t need to know what’s going on in the brain in order to observe, understand, and improve thinking and acting. The Eggplant is about what we can be externally seen to do, when we do reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. It’s based mainly on field observation, so this Part comes to sound more like anthropology rather than cognitive science. It’s about how we do reasonableness in the sense of “what ordinarily-observable operations do we apply in which circumstances,” rather than “how” in the sense of “which brain regions are active in an fMRI scan.”

Cognitivism is so pervasive and taken-for-granted as the default, background, assumed understanding of mind and action that you may find it difficult to set it aside. If you are enculturated into cognitivism, you may find yourself trying to understand everything in this Part as a causal explanation of mental machinery. If so, you will miss the point. That is not what this Part aims to do. I encourage you to set cognitivist explanatory reflexes aside if you can.

In Part Three, I will invert the cognitivist move. Cognitivism takes rationality as the basic phenomenon, with reasonableness understandable only as a defective approximation to it. I will present rationality as a particular application of reasonableness—not an overall-better version, but a specialization—and therefore only correctly understandable if reasonableness is understood.

Accounts, theories, and understandings

In The Eggplant, I distinguish three types of explanations: reasonable accounts, rational theories, and meta-rational understandings. I use these words in specific, quasi-technical ways that don’t quite align with everyday usage, nor exactly with any previous technical usage. So bear in mind, as you read the book, that whenever any of these three words appears, it means something specific and a bit non-standard.

Overall, The Eggplant presents a meta-rational understanding. This was not obvious in Part One, which critiqued rationalist theories, and mostly didn’t provide alternative explanations. It will become apparent here in Part Two that The Eggplant’s explanations are not theories. This is one way in which it is not cognitive science. As a science, cognitive science attempts to formulate and test theories.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem here: until we reach Part Four, I won’t explain in detail what “meta-rationality” means, so I can’t yet explain in detail what a “meta-rational understanding” is. Therefore, the type of explanation in Part Two may seem defective—because it is not a theory, which is probably the sort of explanation you are used to valuing. So the aim of this section is to give a preliminary sense of what an “understanding” is, how it is different from a theory, and why you might find an understanding useful.

A theory is a rational explanation. A theory should be either true or false. (This is more-or-less the meaning of “theory” in the philosophy of science.) A proposed theory can be wrong in either of two ways. It may be false, if it contradicts facts. It may also be not even false, if it makes claims that couldn’t be either true or false. (Those are what the logical positivists called “meaningless” statements, somewhat misleadingly.) It’s hard to see how Hegel’s claim that “self-consciousness recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation” could be either true or false; so it is not a rational theory in this sense.

A common way for a supposed theory to be not-even-false is to be stated in terms of a bad ontology: one with elements that are unusably indefinite, or outright non-existent. We can call those “metaphysical,” as an insult. For example, Hegel’s metaphysical claim is probably not-even-false, because capital-B Being is probably not well-enough defined to make it possible to say anything false (or true) about it. The premodern theory of combustion was wrong because it was stated in terms of a non-detectable metaphysical substance, phlogiston, that turned out not to exist.

Rationalisms attempt, implicitly or explicitly, to be theories of rationality. They may have outright false aspects, but mostly they are not-even-false. For example, decision “theory” is stated in terms of a non-detectable metaphysical substance, “utility,” that almost certainly doesn’t exist. Most correspondence “theories” of truth are stated in terms of non-detectable, ill-defined metaphysical entities, “propositions,” which almost certainly don’t exist. These are failures as “theories” not because they are false, but because their ontologies are wrong.4

A rational theory is primarily epistemological; it wants to be a collection of true beliefs. A meta-rational understanding is primarily ontological; it wants to be a collection of useful distinctions.

Understandings are prior to theories; you have to have an ontology within which you could make true statements.

An understanding mostly cannot be true or false. It can be wrong if its ontology is misleading or unhelpful: one in which true-enough statements cannot be formulated.

Truths are often valuable. Understandings are not better (or worse) than theories; they are a different sort of thing. Understandings may incorporate individual truths or whole theories, because meta-rationality includes rationality and is not opposed to it. An understanding is good (or not) partly on the basis of whether it supports true theories.

Decision theory and the correspondence theory are often useful in practice despite being not-even-false. There is no utility in reality, but choosing to treat some real-world alternative as if it were utility can lead to helpful analyses.5 Parts Three and Four explain how we make this “as if” work.

A meta-rational understanding is not a metaphysical speculation. Like a theory, an understanding should be grounded in specific empirical observations. Like a theory, an understanding can be found to be wrong on the basis of evidence. “Using these two specific different things leads to different results, but this understanding has no way of distinguishing them” shows that the understanding is, at best, incomplete. The way an understanding relies on evidence is different from the way a theory does, however. (We will have to wait for Part Four before getting to that.)

Part Two offers an understanding of reasonableness, and Part Three an understanding of rationality. Neither of these are intended as theories. The Eggplant is not science (cognitive or otherwise) because there mostly aren’t yet detailed theories of the phenomena I discuss. However, presenting understandings rather than theories doesn’t mean they don’t rely on evidence, and it isn’t an evasion of testability. Parts Two and Three could be wrong, and could be shown to be wrong. (I expect some details, at minimum, are wrong.)

The evidential base for The Eggplant decreases as it goes along:

  • Everyday reasoning and acting (“reasonableness”) have been studied extensively in many different fields, some of which have developed well-tested scientific theories. Part Two relies on these studies; as in Part One, almost nothing in this Part is original. Unfortunately, pieces of the understanding are scattered across diverse academic specialities. The aim of Part Two is to summarize the overall story in language broadly accessible to technical professionals. However, I make few specific factual claims, and propose no broad theory of reasonableness, so I won’t systematically cite evidence nor provide a thorough literature review. Instead, I’ll point out some common phenomena, and I expect you’ll say “oh yes, now that you mention it, that’s obviously so.”

  • Part Three draws on detailed empirical case studies of systematic rationality, which number in the hundreds or perhaps thousands. Generally these disconfirm rationalisms. (Ironically, rationalisms have historically paid little attention to facts, and proceeded mainly from a priori metaphysical speculation.) However, not enough empirical work has yet been done to formulate better, scientifically testable theories of rationality. Currently, a preliminary understanding is the best we can currently manage. There’s no reason further work couldn’t produce detailed theories, and I hope it will.

  • I know of few if any detailed studies of meta-rationality. There are only a handful of works devoted specifically to the topic. However, because meta-rationality is a pervasive part of advanced technical professional practice, examples often come up in informal discussions. The understanding presented in Part Three is based largely on anecdotes and my personal experience. This is unsatisfactory. There’s no reason meta-rationality can’t be observed carefully, and eventually studied scientifically, but the work hasn’t yet been done.

It may be best to regard The Eggplant as a collection of observations which doesn’t prove anything, but instead invites you to observe your own technical work; and suggests that you may see similar things; and (in Parts Four and Five) makes suggestions for how those observations may lead you to doing rationality somewhat differently and better.

Because The Eggplant is meant to be practically useful for technical professionals, not to be an academic work, I won’t discuss or even footnote sources extensively. I expect most readers will not want to hear much about cognitive-developmental psychology, visual psychophysics, ethnomethodology, or the history of science. If you are an exception, the Further Reading Appendix may be interesting.

At the beginning of this section, I mentioned “accounts” as a third type of explanation. Accounts are a central feature of reasonableness, and we’ll cover them later in Part Two. However, no part of The Eggplant is itself intended as an account, so I don’t need to say more about them in this preliminary meta discussion.

Descriptive and normative theories

Going all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, rationalism has tended to equivocate about whether it is a solely normative theory, or also a descriptive one as well. Rationalism always is normative: you should be rational, and here’s how to do that.6 Some rationalisms also make the descriptive claim that you are rational, and here’s how you do do it.

For example, many theories in cognitive science have held that human reasoning not only ought to conform to mathematical logic, it actually does. There’s overwhelming evidence against that claim, so it is much less popular now than a few decades ago. Some cognitive scientists still take probabilism as a descriptive theory of the brain, however.7

Since people are obviously mostly not rational, descriptive rationalism has mainly retreated to the claim that part of your brain is properly rational, and part of it isn’t. We’ll come back to that in the next section.

Like rationality, reasonableness is also normative, but quite differently. It is not so much the content of reasonable norms that differ, as the way they operate, which we’ll call “accountability.” Understanding this is central to understanding what reasonableness is; I explain this later in Part Two.

Meta-rationalism accepts the distinct normativities of reasonableness and rationality, as they are. Therefore, Parts Two and Three of this book are descriptive only. They merely describe ways of being that are themselves normative, and I do not challenge or amend either type of norm.

However, Part Four is normative, in a third way. Just as rationalism says you ought to be rational, meta-rationalism says that, as a technical professional, you ought to develop your meta-rational competence; you have a moral duty to do so.

This is not a dual-process theory

People are rational some of the time, but not all the time. Maybe there’s part of us that is rational, and part that isn’t? This is an attractive theory, because it suggests that we could be consistently rational, or at least rational more often, if we strengthen our rational part in its struggle with the other part. (This idea also goes back to the Ancient Greeks.)

So what is that other part? Rationality has been contrasted with—among many other qualities—irrationality, emotionality, intuition, creativity, superstition, religion, fantasy, imagination, self-deception, unconscious thought, and subjectiveness.

Rationalists tend to blur or collapse all these non-rational phenomena into a single homogeneous, inferior, and uninteresting category. In psychology, this is called dual process theory↗︎︎: there are just two primary mental faculties or modes of thought, the rational one, and all that other stuff. A recent version, popularized in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow↗︎︎ describes them as System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and emotional; and System 2, which is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. According to this theory, “cognitive biases” explain irrationality, which consists of allowing System 1 to act instead of System 2.

Because ideas like this are pervasive in our “folk understanding” of thinking, an easy way to misunderstand “reasonableness” is as System 1, or the general non-rational way of thinking. This would be wrong for three reasons.

  • Reasonableness does not show most characteristics typically ascribed to the non-rational cluster. It is not irrational, emotional, intuitive, creative, superstitious, religious, fantasy-prone, self-deceptive, unconscious, or subjective. The Eggplant doesn’t discuss any of these categories. They have no relevance to the issues the book is about.

  • The Eggplant is not about mental mechanisms. The reasonableness vs. rationality distinction is about what people do, not about what’s happening in their brains while they’re doing it. So, the book does not depend on any cognitive processing theory, and does not offer one. However, for what it’s worth, I suspect reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality can each draw on all cognitive abilities and psychological processes. There is no “rational part” of the brain or of the mind. Reasonableness and rationality are both cultural practices, not mental modules or neural processing modes.

  • The Eggplant draws three-way distinctions among reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. And, it doesn’t consider those three exhaustive. For example, none of them are irrational or emotional, which are certainly ways people can be. Lumping everything non-rational together seems to make for a highly simplistic model of mind.8

A few things we do know about brains

Brains have evolved for hundred of millions of years, almost entirely for routine practical activities such as collecting food and avoiding predators. Systematic rationality is primarily a modern product of the European Enlightenment,9 so presumably it is mainly the result of cultural evolution, not biological evolution. There hasn’t been time for a separate brain system for rationality to evolve. We must do calculus mostly by re-using mechanisms that evolved for finding berries. It’s not surprising that we find it difficult and are bad at it.

We don’t have much understanding of what neurons do. One thing we do know is that whatever they do, they do it extremely slowly, relative to computer hardware. It takes about ten milliseconds for a neuron to do anything. Some mental operations complete in about 100 milliseconds. This probably rules out many sorts of sequential processing, such as those necessary for logical inference.

Another thing we know about neurons is that there are an awful lot of them, and each connects to an awful lot of others. Estimates vary, but maybe a hundred billion neurons, making a quadrillion connections total.

What we are extraordinarily good at, and don’t have much conscious access to, is making sense of concrete situations in terms of background understanding of meaning. If someone asks “is there any water in the refrigerator?” you immediately know that they want to drink some, without having to reason about it. This sort of understanding was useful in our evolutionary history, while calculus, had it existed, would not have been.

Putting these facts together, it seems that much of what the brain does must involve shallow consideration of extremely large numbers of possible meanings simultaneously. Almost all possible interpretations are wrong. The bit of your brain that tries to explain everything in terms of wooden spoons fails, as does the one with a passion for woodpeckers. The thirst bit discovers that its obsession is relevant, presumably based on your experiences of drinking water from refrigerators, so that’s the sense you make of the question.10

In Part Three, we’ll see how key methods of rationality work by stopping these processes from jumping to wrong conclusions. “Fast vs. slow” is not altogether wrong; it’s just not a good theory of brain mechanisms.

Never mind the Church-Turing Thesis

Some rationalisms claim it is impossible that humans could be other than rational, as a matter of principle.

Any method of reasoning other than mathematical logic will lead you to holding contradictory beliefs. From any two contradictory beliefs, you can deduce all falsehoods. Since we don’t believe all false things, our brains must run on logic.

That was quite popular in the 1980s; you don’t hear it anymore. Here’s one I’ve encountered several times recently:

The Physical Church-Turing Thesis↗︎︎, an absolute truth, says that all possible computations can be specified by a set of rational, formal, mathematical rules. Therefore, humans, who are bound by the laws of physics, cannot be anything other than rational. In particular, there can be no such thing as “meta-rationality” beyond rationality; that’s physically impossible. And “reasonableness” cannot be anything other than a defective approximation to rationality.

Oddly, people who say this are usually also vociferous proponents of the superiority of rationality to irrationality, and quick to condemn opponents as irrational. The logical contradiction between “it’s impossible for brains to do anything other than rationality” and “most people are hopelessly irrational” appears not to bother them. The confusion here seems to be between “all rational systems are formal” and “all formal systems are rational.” A rational system must have some “distinctive virtue”; most formal systems do not. A randomly-generated computer program is formal, but will almost certainly do nothing useful.

Once one grants that people can be non-rational in one way—specifically, irrational—the possibility of being non-rational in other ways (such as reasonable or meta-rational) cannot be ruled out by this argument. In particular, meta-rationality does not involve “hypercomputation↗︎︎,” meaning computing the mathematically uncomputable.

If rationality is defined as “any sort of thinking or acting that works well,” then reasonableness and meta-rationality, which often work well, would indeed have to be rational. This is not usually what rationalism means by “rational,” though; it’s too vague to make a theory of. Usually the definition is something more specific, about which optimality might be proven.

The sorts of thinking and acting that rationalisms have usually proposed theories of are the same sorts I will term “rational.” Rationalisms have generally not made theories of reasonable or meta-rational sorts of thinking and acting. Drawing these distinctions is just a terminological choice; those are never correct or incorrect. Perhaps rationalist theories could be extended to cover reasonable and meta-rational activities; but introducing these additional terms points out that they haven’t yet. It suggests that these are important, mostly-overlooked aspects of technical practice, and might need a different sort of explanation.

This is not about folk theories

If you ask non-philosophers about philosophical topics, such as how rationality or science work, they frequently give confident explanations. Philosophers call such answers “folk theories.” They treat folk theories as useful sources of intuition, and starting points for analysis, but consider them confused and inadequately precise. Many philosophers think that their job is to fix folk theories. Often their “fixes” replace vague, complex, mostly-accurate understandings with formal, simplistic, blatantly-wrong theories.

Recognizing this, other theorists may champion folk understandings against academic ones. In that approach, to develop a better theory of rationality than rationalism’s, one might try interviewing lots of technical professionals, asking them how they think rationality works, and hope to summarize and synthesize their answers. As far as I know, no one has seriously attempted this. It might be worth trying, but my guess is that it would not go well.

If you ask scientists how science works, they typically recite a theory of The Scientific Method they learned in high school. That theory entered the science curriculum in the mid-twentieth century and hasn’t been revised since. It’s a simplified version of the mid-century state of the art in the philosophy of science: a bit of late logical positivism mixed up with a bit of Popper’s falsificationism. This theory is incoherent and false, but it doesn’t do too much harm because it’s also irrelevant to what scientists actually do. If you ask a scientist how their science works—about the problem they are working on today—they will give a detailed, accurate explanation, which has nothing to do with their regurgitated version of The Scientific Method.

It seems folk theories of rationality are derived from obsolete rationalisms; collecting and synthesizing them would probably just give you back a muddled version of 1950s philosophy of science.

So that is not the method of The Eggplant. Instead, its understanding derives from observational studies of how people actually do technical work—not how they believe they do it, or what they say about how they do it. This understanding is as dissimilar to folk theories as it is to rationalism.

  • 1. For a useful overview of interactionism, see Philip E. Agre, “Computational research on interaction and agency↗︎︎,” Artificial Intelligence 72 (1995) pp. 1-52. Although this introduced a collection of AI papers, Agre surveys interactionist approaches in diverse fields, including neuroscience, dynamical systems theory, evolutionary theory, activity theory, developmental psychology, phenomenology, sociology, and anthropology. The sources he references have been critical to forming my understanding in The Eggplant also.
  • 2. Cognitive scientists have increasingly recognized the deficiencies of cognitivism, and are increasingly taking interactionism on board as the alternative. One term for the movement is “4E,” standing for “Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enactive.” For a recent survey, see The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition↗︎︎.
  • 3. My view that cognitive science is mostly unhelpful is not universal; many books do aim to help you think and act better by drawing on cognitive science. Their approaches are quite different from that of The Eggplant; they may offer complementary value.
  • 4. Decision theory and model theory are, however, fine as mathematical theories, a technical term that means “all the statements that can be deduced from a set of axioms.” (Model theory is a formal version of the correspondence theory of truth.) Mathematical theories are never true or false, and are not “theories” in the sense I’m using here.
  • 5. In economics and financial theory, money is routinely treated as if it were utility. This is not even approximately true, but often useful.
  • 6. Some rationalisms hold that being rational, according to their normative standard, is impossible. In that case, they may be “prescriptive,” as well as “normative,” by telling you what you should do to be more nearly rational.
  • 7. The “free energy principle↗︎︎” of Karl Friston is perhaps the most popular descriptive probabilistic rationalism currently.
  • 8. Interestingly, the System 1/2 terminology originated with Keith Stanovich. He subsequently made the point that “System 1” is misleadingly heterogeneous. He also introduced a “tri-process theory” in which one of the three is explicitly meta-rational. In cognitive science, meta-rational operations are often described as “reflective,” and Stanovich’s third process is a “reflection” that judges when it’s worth applying “algorithmic” rationality. “Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory?” In J. St. B. T. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond, 2009, pp. 55–88.
  • 9. Systematic rationality also developed to some extent in other great civilizations during the past 2500 years or so: Ancient Greece, Rome, India, China, and others. Some parts of the medieval Tibetan philosophical literature are startlingly systematic, as another instance.
  • 10. This is not intended as a specific cognitive model, I don’t know of any specific evidence for it, and nothing in the book turns on it. It’s intended as a vague possible a priori explanation for how the brain may deal with the unenumerability of potential considerations.

The ethnomethodological flip

Parts Two and Three of The Eggplant aim for a dramatic perspective shift. Whereas rationalism understands everyday reasonableness as a defective approximation to formal rationality, we will understand formal rationality as a specialized application of everyday reasonableness.1

This flip is best developed in the field of ethnomethodology, which could be described as the empirical study of reasoning and activity, both everyday and technical.2 Parts Two and Three draw primarily on ethnomethodological investigations; I will cite some specific studies as we go along. However, I avoid its difficult jargon, and do not attempt to summarize the field overall, nor necessarily to present it entirely accurately.3

Flipping the relationship between reasonableness and rationality may be disorienting at first. From a rationalist perspective, a natural response might be:

It’s true that human reasoning capability depends on biological hardware that is ill-suited for rationality. You may have a point that cognitive biases and limitations inevitably contaminate science and engineering to some extent. Indeed, it may be worth understanding the details of those in order to eliminate them as much as possible, by bringing our reasoning and beliefs into better accord with rational norms.

This misses the point. Rather, from the meta-rationalist perspective:

Everyday reasonableness provides a wealth of resources that technical rationality necessarily depends on. It does things rationality, unaided, cannot. It is worth understanding the details of those in order to use them better in our practice of rationality, to power it up.

This change of perspective implies a change in explanatory priority. We need to understand reasonableness first (in Part Two), as the basis for understanding rationality (in Part Three). The title of Part Two, “Taking reasonableness seriously↗︎︎,” is meant to suggest that reasonableness is more complex and important than both rationalism and common understanding take it to be.

Rationalism supposes that formal rationality could, at least in principle, serve as a complete mechanism of thinking and acting. However, formal reasoning cannot, unaided, bridge the gap between formalism and reality. Only reasonableness can span that abyss. Reasonableness makes direct contact with nebulous reality, which rationality can’t. This is the main topic of Part Two. Abstracting from a concrete situation to the formal realm, and applying formal solutions in concrete activity, depend on reasonable perception, judgement, interpretation, and improvisation. This will be the main topic of Part Three.

Because it assumes rationality alone could suffice, rationalism takes reasonableness to be the same sort of thing as rationality. That is, it assumes reasonableness is also a way of manipulating representations of beliefs and choosing actions to satisfy goals. Rationalism points to cases in which using rationality, rather than reasonableness, works dramatically better—and rightly so! Indeed, starting from the mistaken understanding that reasonableness and rationality have the same function, it is natural to conclude that reasonableness is a defective approximation. However, manipulating representations and making decisions are not mainly how reasonableness works. Rationality and reasonableness have different functions. Meta-rationality requires choosing the right tool for the job: including when, and how, to use reasonableness or rationality or a particular combination of the two.

Explanatory priority is not a value judgement. Rationalism takes rationality as simply better than alternatives. The meta-rationalist agenda is not to invert that valuation (as some anti-rational ideologies attempt). Rather, meta-rationalism aims to use reasonableness and rationality for different purposes, and also to show their mutual dependence in technical practice.

The cognitive biases field of psychology assumes reasonableness is a bad approximation to rationality and investigates exactly how it differs. The results are both theoretically interesting and useful in practice. Specific patterns of bad reasoning result when one fails to apply rationality in cases when it’s necessary. Recognizing these allow correction.

Conversely, specific patterns of bad reasoning result when one applies rationality in cases in which it is not called for. We’ll discuss those at the end of part Three. Our view will be that rationality is not uniformly superior; it’s a better tool for some jobs.

Shifting the prototypes of reason

Rationality developed as a collection of tools for reasoning better in certain sorts of difficult situations in which people typically think badly. Naturally, rationalism focuses its explanations on those situation types. It takes them as prototypical, and marginalizes and silently passes over more typical sorts of situations and patterns of thinking and acting. This emphasis tends to make rationality seem universally effective.

Gambling games and board games are fun partly because humans are inherently bad at them, and yet we can get better with practice. They are fun also because they are fair, so we can accurately compare skill levels. Making games learnable and fair requires engineering out nebulosity: uncontrolled extraneous factors that are “not part of the game.” That also makes games particularly easy to analyze formally. Much of technical rationality was invented either specifically to play formal games, or by taking formal games as conceptual models for other activities.

Formal games are a tiny part of what most people spend most of their time doing. They are also misleading prototypes for most other things we do, which intimately involve nebulosity. Especially, since technical work constantly grapples with nebulosity, theories of rationality developed to understand poker and chess miss much of what scientists and engineers do.

Cognitive bias research looks at how reasonableness fails to cope with formal games. Our shift in explanatory priority implies starting instead by examining situations that reasonableness deals well with.4 I will use making breakfast as a common source of examples. Formal rationality is neither necessary nor useful when frying an egg.

It’s tempting to think that, since our eventual goal is to understand rationality, it would be best to focus on what it’s good at. But that’s what got rationalism into all the sorts of trouble we reviewed in Part One. In Part Three, we’ll see that, since rationality depends on reasonableness to deal with nebulosity, understanding it really does need to start with breakfast, not chess.

So our strategy is to start by analyzing typical sorts of situations and typical (reasonable) ways of thinking and acting, and then extend that understanding to the atypical (rational) ones.

The transmutation of metaphysics

By shifting the prototypes of reason, the ethnomethodological flip allows us to dissolve the impossible conundrums of epistemology we found in Part One. Through the rest of the book, we’ll remodel metaphysical problems faced by theorists as practical hassles faced by ordinary people in the course of their routine work.

For instance, we replace the insoluble theoretical problem of reference—“how could non-physical propositions refer to physical objects?”—with the practical problem of “I’m explaining how to remove an engine flywheel over the phone; what can I say that will help this person see which screws to loosen?” We replace the insoluble theoretical problem of defining The Scientific Method with the practical problem of “what method can I use to stain only the neurons undergoing toxic dopamine catabolism?”

This may seem unsatisfactory, if you want a tidy general theory of reference, or a precise explanation of why science is unambiguously superior to pseudoscience. Unfortunately, such theories are unavailable. They’re certainly unavailable now, and probably will be forever, because there isn’t a coherent subject matter.

There is no general theory of what makes something a planet, because the category “planet” is inherently incoherent. So are categories such as “reference,” “belief,” and “science.” Attempts to make simple, crisp theories of these phenomena inevitably stray into metaphysical explanations, because no naturalistic ones are possible.

We can find naturalistic understandings of more specific, concrete phenomena, like “why do only mid-sized rocky planets have magnetic fields” or “how is the word ‘the’ used to accomplish reference,” or “what are some ways of believing,” or “when is null hypothesis significance testing actually justified?”

  • 1. Martin Heidegger first proposed this reversal of the rationalist explanation in Being and Time↗︎︎ (1927); see Hubert L. Dreyfus’ Being-in-the-World↗︎︎ (1990) for discussion, and Philip E. Agre’s Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎ (1997), pp. 5-9, for a concise summary.
  • 2. Ethnomethodologists might find this definition a bit off. They are wary of the word “reasoning” for its cognitivist implications, and of “empirical” for its scientistic implications, although with suitable qualifications most would accept both. In the field, the term for the “flip” is “respecification.”
  • 3. I will do my best not to misrepresent it, but I am not an expert in the field. For an authoritative introduction, see John Heritage’s Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology↗︎︎ (1991).
  • 4. For more on the explanatory priority of everyday activity, see for instance Rodney A. Brooks, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess↗︎︎,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990) pp. 3-15; and David Chapman and Philip E. Agre, “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity,” Reasoning About Actions and Plans, Michael P. Georgeff and Amy L. Lansky, eds., Morgan-Kauffman, Los Altos, CA, 1987, pp. 411-424. For a broader discussion of the necessity of shifting prototypes, see the discussion of center/margin dynamics and technical metaphors in Chapters 2 and 3 of Philip E. Agre’s Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎ (1997).

Aspects of reasonableness

Having finished the preliminary explanations of what sort of understanding Part Two of The Eggplant offers, here we begin its substance: an understanding of reasonableness.

This table summarizes aspects of effective thinking and acting in reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality. The second column summarizes the contents of this Part.

Aspect Reasonable Rational Meta-rational
Relationship with reality Interactive Detached Reflectively relating formalism and reality
Breadth of considerations Context-dependent Universal Context-crossing
Effective action Ad hoc Systematic Meta-systematic
Improvised Procedural Flexible contextual use and revision of procedures
Purposiveness Purpose-laden Purpose-independent Evaluating and coordinating purposes
Contingencies Routine Exceptional or problematic Reflective
… Problems Everyday hassles Solution specifications Messes to manage
Inference Accountable, negotiable Truth-preserving Meta-epistemic
Epistemology Informal Formal Relating formal and informal
Concrete Abstract Crossing abstraction levels
Specific General Relating details with big picture
Tacit Explicit Relating implicit and explicit
Knowing how Knowing that Understanding in context
Reasonable account Rigorous theory Context-crossing understanding
Ontology Nebulous Clear-cut Relates formal patterns and nebulosity
… Categories Counting-as Rigorous definition Reflection on boundaries
… Truth Purposive, contextual Absolute “In what sense?”

We’ll return to this chart in Part Three, where I explain how rationality deals with the third column; and again in Part Four, concerning the fourth. You might want to think ahead about what the entries in those columns might mean. The third column may seem obvious; the fourth maybe not so much.

As a reminder, this is not a dual-process cognitive theory. That has two implications:

  • Resist the temptation to mentally add rows to the table: for example contrasting emotion and reason, or unconscious and conscious, or subjective and objective. These are not contrasts between reasonableness and rationality (as those terms are used in this book).

  • Entries in the first column are aspects of activity, in which circumstances and people always both play roles, which cannot be separated. As an exercise, it may be helpful to consider each entry in the second column and think about how situational features might contribute to making that mode of activity appropriate. As individuals, we have some choice about when to be reasonable versus rational, but choosing well depends heavily on circumstances. (Deciding whether to approach a particular situation reasonably or rationally is a meta-rational judgement.)

Aspects of the Theory of Breakfast

Making breakfast is better done reasonably than rationally. Let’s take it as a prototype, and look at it in terms of the aspects of activity in the table above.1

Making breakfast is necessarily highly interactive because the materials (cake, jam, eggs, yogurt) are nebulous: floppy, crumbly, sticky, lumpy, squishy, runny, and effectively impossible to model formally. It requires constant hand-eye coordination to make them behave. Cooking a cheese and spinach omelet by executing a detailed procedure or plan that spelled out every finger motion in advance is out of the question.

Normally you are only concerned with making this breakfast, now, here, for these people. You can, therefore, make use of all the specific resources available in the context. You don’t need to work out a system for breakfast-making that anyone could use on any occasion; you can improvise details based on available ingredients and equipment, ad hoc. Unless you are a serious food geek, you are not interested in universal properties of breakfasts in general.

The purpose of making breakfast is to have a breakfast to eat. Doubts can be addressed with “will this count as an adequate breakfast for the occasion?” rather than some criterion of epistemic correctness. There is no absolute truth about whether you have achieved an omelet. It looks like an omelet, pretty much; the question is only whether you are willing to eat it. And whether your family is willing to eat it; you may need to negotiate its omeletness with them.

You may have the same breakfast every day, or select among a small number of different ones. Maybe sometimes on the weekend you could try something more ambitious, but usually breakfast-making is almost entirely routine. You know how to do it. Often there are minor hassles (you may spill some egg on the stove), but dealing with them is also routine.

Your knowledge of breakfast-making is largely tacit, concrete know-how, rather than something you could write out in detail while sitting in an office. What finger motions do you make when gripping a spatula? What visual features of an omelet tell you when its done? No one can say. To the extent that you can describe breakfast-making, you will produce a reasonable account rather than a rigorous theory.2

  • 1. The title of this section is a play on Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax↗︎︎, a foundational text of cognitivism.
  • 2. As a consequence of all these aspects, programming a humanoid robot to make breakfast is well beyond the current state of the art in artificial intelligence research.

Reasonableness is meaningful activity

Three people cooking together

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Rhoda Baer

Reasonableness↗︎︎, in the way The Eggplant uses the word, is a quality of activity—stuff we do.1 It is reasonable to make an omelet for breakfast; it is not reasonable to make bismuth crystals for breakfast.

In this chapter, we’ll understand “activity” and “meaningfulness” partly by contrast with rationality↗︎︎. Formal rationality is mostly not about doing stuff, and it depends on meaninglessness.

In Part Three, we’ll build an understanding of rationality on top of the understanding of meaningful activity developed here in Part Two. Giving explanatory priority to concrete activity in specific situations, rather than to disembodied abstract reasoning, is an example of the “ethnomethodological flip.”

Activity is a flow involved in a specific situation

Activity is a seamless flow that continues throughout life. At any moment, activity is involved in a unique, meaningful situation: at a meaningful time, in a meaningful place, with meaningful social and material accompaniments; from all of which it is inseparable. You are always already doing something, other activities are already in flow around you, and you get on with it.

Reasonable activity is in unstopping, intimate contact with the world. You continually perceive relevant aspects of your situation and adjust your activity to account for contextual features. Within a fraction of a second, your hand adjusts the angle of the milk carton as you see or feel it pouring too quickly into your cereal bowl. (The upcoming chapters on routineness and meaningful perception explain more about how this works and what it implies for rationality.)

For reasonable activity, the context is both the “problem” and the resource for addressing it.2 Your concrete circumstances include obstacles to whatever you are trying to do, so stuff constantly goes wrong; but the situation also includes the cues and the equipment you need to get the task done, and to repair most trouble you run into.

Rationality is mostly not about activity

Part Two consistently uses the word “activity,” sometimes in places “action” might sound better. That emphasizes its continuing, interactive quality, in contrast with rationalist theories of action.

Criteria of rationality typically apply to abstract solutions to formal problems. A deduction is rational if it’s in accord with the rules of logic; a decision is rational if it’s in accord with the rules of decision theory.

Rationality is powerful because it is not about specific activities and situations. If a rational analysis is correct, it doesn’t matter who did the work, or how. It doesn’t matter whether they used paper and pencil or a spreadsheet; it doesn’t matter if they got it wrong three times first; it doesn’t matter that they were totally stressed out because they were in the middle of a messy divorce and that’s why they had trouble. Anyone can verify the solution, and the activity that led to it is irrelevant.

Rationality derives its power from context-stripping, from abstraction, from detachment. It aims for universal theories, context-independent generality, solutions for whole classes of problems; not just muddling through on a one-off, any-old-way, good-enough basis.

That power comes at the cost of disconnection from reality. As we saw in the chapter on reference in Part One, formal rationality can never be in direct contact with the world. In rationalist usage, an “action” is a formal object, not a real-world event. It is one of the possible outputs of a mathematical computation. It is a member of a well-defined set of clearly distinct possible actions, an identical instance of a formal type, not a complex, unique occurrence. Rationality abstracts a situation into a formal problem, finds a formal solution consisting of a formal action or actions, and then considers itself done with the job.

In Part Three, we’ll see how rationality depends on reasonableness to bridge the gap between representations and effective action. That makes Part Two, explaining reasonable activity and meaningful perception, a prerequisite.

Reasonable activity is immediately meaningful

To count as reasonable, activity must be meaningful in at least two ways.

  • It’s concretely purposeful: you are doing something for a reason that is present in the local specifics of your situation. Typically, this purpose is perceivable and directly relevant, as we’ll see in the chapter on meaningful perception.

  • Reasonable activity also has to make sense: it’s explainable, orderly, not chaotic, random, arbitrary, or irrational. The chapter on accountability↗︎︎ explains how that works.

Meaninglessness is a key to rationality

By contrast, rational knowledge and methods are not purpose-specific, and often make no sense. That is the source of their power, and also their limitations.

Rationality mostly aims to produce or apply theoretical knowledge that is independent of specific purposes. Newton’s equation for gravitational force has numerous practical applications, but the theory itself is general-purpose. There is a sense in which rationality is, and indeed should be, disinterested.

Rational work is not pointless. You do it for reasons, but they are typically remote in space, in time, or in abstraction level, and are not immediately perceptible. You may perform chemical experiments in hopes of inventing a better car battery, as a way of addressing climate change. There is, however, no electric car and no sea level rise evident in the laboratory.

Rationality is not meaningless overall, but meaninglessness plays a central role in it. That is a key aspect of formality.

A formal solution has to remain valid under arbitrary changes in meaning. For example, from “all ravens are black” and “Huginn is a raven,” it is valid to conclude that Huginn is black. Therefore, it must also valid to conclude from “all wampets are hudon” and “Snorri is a wampet” that Snorri is hudon—even though “wampet” and “hudon” are meaningless. If your decision theoretic analysis tells you to abstain from buying tickets in the Dutch national lottery, you also should accept its telling you not to divorce your spouse, so long as the payoff matrix has the same numbers in it. The math doesn’t “know” what it is “about.”

Rational inference often makes no sense; and its senselessness is part of what gives it its extraordinary power. Much of what we know from science is empirical and inexplicable. Demanding a reasonable account relinquishes its value.

  • 1. In common usage, “reasonable” is also something people are (or aren’t). That sort of judgement is not relevant here, although to say that someone is reasonable is pretty much the same as saying things they do are usually reasonable, in pretty much the same sense as that of The Eggplant. In ordinary usage, “reasonableness” may also imply “agreeableness.” That’s not an intended sense here.
  • 2. I put quotation marks around “problem” because making breakfast does not usually involve problems in the everyday sense of the word. This is a significant point that we’ll come back to.

You are accountable for reasonableness

Elizabeth: Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren—
Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate’s code to apply, and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner!
Pirates of the Caribbean

Reasonableness has normative force: you should be reasonable. And, by and large, everyone will hold you to account for being reasonable. If you are unreasonable, people will give you a hard time about it.

Rationality also has normative force. If you do professional work, you should apply professional rationality. However, the nature of reasonable and rational normative forces are quite different. This is key to understanding the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, and how they each work.

It is key at the theoretical level: this chapter on “accountability” is central to the overall understanding of The Eggplant. It’s also key pragmatically: much of the work of learning to be rational consists of coming to understand how its normative force differs from that of reasonableness.1

  • Rational norms are absolute, abstract, and universal. They ground in—derive from—ultimate principles. They do not consider the idiosyncratic meanings of a specific situation; they are independent of contexts and purposes. They are therefore non-negotiable and do not permit interpretation. Either you factored the polynomial correctly or you didn’t; there’s no room for argument.

  • What counts as reasonable is always contextual, purpose-dependent, and situation-specific. Reasonableness is realistic—unlike rationality—in recognizing that there are always unenumerable potentially relevant considerations. (This unenumerability was the take-home conclusion of Part One.) Which considerations are meaningful, and so should be taken into account, and how to do so, is always subject to interpretation, and often negotiation.

Reasonableness is public

Reasonableness is public: it’s observably orienting to norms; that is, taking them into account. Accountability manifests in giving informal accounts of the reasonableness of activity in context:2

I should get a haircut. It’s overdue

You didn’t turn the oven off—no wonder the cookies are so hard

He went to the post office to see if the check had arrived

Where do these accounts come from? How do we know what is relevant, and why, and in what way? For cognitive science, this is a fascinating, mainly unanswered theoretical question about mental mechanisms.3 But The Eggplant is “not about the inside of your head.” Instead, it’s about easily observable facts of what people do. On that basis, we can describe aspects of what is done, in some detail.

This is the ethnomethodological flip. We replace the cognitive scientist’s theoretical question “what brain mechanisms compute what is relevant?” with the corresponding practical task everyone faces every minute.4 In practical situations, we frequently ask each other, explicitly or implicitly, “is this reasonable, and why?” We can understand these questions, and their answers, without opening peoples’ heads.

Similarly, the epistemologist asks “what is rational, and why?” in theory, and so runs into unsolvable metaphysical problems. If we do technical work, we frequently ask “is this rational, and why?” For that we give specific, practical, non-metaphysical answers. We can determine whether someone is acting rationally without reference to their brain states.

Reasonableness is recursive

What counts as reasonable? Something’s reasonable if you can give a reasonable account of its being reasonable. What makes that account reasonable?

A definition of a term in terms of itself is termed recursive. For example, a number is “natural” if it is one greater than another natural number. In formal rationality, recursion only works if it grounds out in a part of the definition that is not recursive. The definition of natural numbers grounds out with zero, which is defined to be a natural number by fiat.5 Then we know two is a natural number because it is one plus one, which we know is a natural number because it is one plus zero.

Reasonableness is recursive: whether X is reasonable potentially depends on consideration Y; but whether and how Y reasonably supports or undermines the reasonableness of X is itself a question of reasonableness, which potentially depends on Z, and so on.

The recursive structure of reasonableness can be observed in negotiations about whether something is reasonable.

A: Why is she going on a date with that Harold guy? She said she wasn’t at all interested.

B: I don’t know; maybe some irrational feeling of obligation?

A: It’s just going to waste both their time. It’s stupid; she should just say no, politely.6

This is a normative account. She should think and feel and act differently. What she’s doing is “irrational” and “stupid”; it’s not reasonable.

But it’s not a claim that she should conform to some specific system of rules, or some theory of how to think and feel and act. It’s purpose-dependent: she shouldn’t go on the date unless she’s “interested.” It’s context-dependent: not that no one should ever go on a date with someone they aren’t interested in; it’s that, all things considered, she shouldn’t go on a date with Harold.

Speaker A began by asking a question about meaning: why is she going on the date? What’s wanted is not a causal explanation (“high activity in brain region C4X”) but a meaningful interpretation of an activity that appears meaningless. B’s interpretation is that it’s an irrational mistake, based on an inappropriate feeling, involving a erroneous take on the meaning of the situation (“obligation”). Speaker A tacitly accepted that account. But this may not end the matter; other accounts are possible:

C: Well, he did help her assemble the new Ikea dining set. That took all day!

This brings to bear a previously unmentioned fact that C considers relevant. Any number of additional, alternative accounts may be considered:

D: That’s just being a good neighbor. And friend. You shouldn’t mix up being friends with dating.

Unlike previous accounts, this apparently invokes a universal principle: you shouldn’t date your friends. However, reasonableness, unlike rationality, never treats principles as absolute. There always may be countervailing considerations that also must be taken into account:

C: It’s just lunch! It’s not like a date date.

The principle is treated as one factor among many that the participants interpret, consider the relevance of, and use as a resource in negotiating a judgement.

Rationality is mainly about determining truths. Reasonableness is not much concerned with truth for its own sake. However, the truth values of facts can be relevant considerations among others:

A: That’s not what I heard. It was going to be lunch, and then he changed it. He’s taking her to Chez Jean.

The credibility of facts, and their relevance, and their meanings, are subject to further accounting:

C: It sounded to me more like that was a mutual decision.

B: That doesn’t make any sense. She said he wasn’t her type.

Reasonableness has no ultimate ground

This argument sounds like it could go on forever. How can the matter finally be settled? Where does the recursion ground out?

In eggplant-sized reality, relevant factors are unenumerable and absolute truths are scarce, so there can be no ultimate grounding. In principle, negotiation may be non-terminating. Yet, in practice, people generally reach a reasonable consensus quickly. There is no infinite regress, because we don’t pursue anything infinitely. There can be no ultimate, fixed, universal ground, but in specific situations, we usually quickly agree on what counts as reasonable.

If there is persistent disagreement, the matter will have to be dealt with reasonably at another level: by dropping the question, for instance, or agreeing to disagree, or taking a vote, or someone claiming legitimate authority to make a final judgement, or whatever. This is an obvious aspect of everyday social reality. These are standard methods of dispute resolution, whose reasonableness and relevance are always also accountable and negotiable.

Reasonableness depends on assumed good faith and moral trust; there’s no guarantee for those.

There is also no guarantee of eventual objective correctness, because there can’t be any. The hope for such a guarantee is the fallacy of rationalist epistemology.

Fortunately, reasonableness usually more-or-less coincides with what is moral and what is pragmatically effective. (There are hideous exceptions, of course.)

Usually it’s reasonable to bake cookies, and unreasonable to bake your sister’s ski hat. Usually it’s reasonable to go on a date with someone you hope to go to bed with, and unreasonable to go on a date with someone you aren’t interested in. These generalizations are subject to unenumerable usualness conditions, however. They are more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.

This non-systematicity is what gives reasonableness both its power and its limits. Due to nebulosity, we can’t treat everything systematically; that was the conclusion of Part One. Reasonableness has unenumerably many methods for working with nebulosity effectively (some explained in the rest of Part Two). They aren’t systematic, so they come with no guarantees, and in fact frequently fail. Rationality is brittle in the face of nebulosity, but brings the awesome power of systematic formal methods. When nebulosity can be tamed, rationality vastly outstrips the capabilities of mere reasonableness.

Being reasonable all by yourself

In collaborative activity, people usually constantly narrate what they are doing, and give frequent accounts of its reasonableness. We can directly observe the details—in person, or by way of a video recording—of an argument about whether it is reasonable to have nothing but cookies for dinner. This is not true of solitary activity, so for evidence we must rely on our private experience, or the reported experiences of others; and those are less reliable.

Nevertheless, it does not seem controversial to say that most solitary activity is also reasonable, for two reasons. First, you are often likely to have to give an account of its reasonableness later.

What were you doing all afternoon?

I stuffed socks full of goldfish crackers and glued them to the lightbulbs.

That may not go well, so taking into account whether you can account for your time is usually wise.

Second, inasmuch as reasonableness is usually a good guide to moral and practical adequacy, you are likely to want to be reasonable for your own sake. So, you may give yourself a silent account of the reasonableness of your activity as you engage in it.7 This is reasonable thinking-through of what you are doing.

  • 1. We’ll return to this point in Part Three in the chapter on learning to be rational↗︎︎.
  • 2. This is a central theme of ethnomethodology, which began by demanding a concrete answer to the question “what is the nature of a social norm?”, which sociologists treated abstractly and metaphysically instead. So how do social norms actually work in practice? We apply the ethnomethodological flip: this is an everyday hassle for regular people, not a problem that can be solved theoretically. The answer—at least in part—is accountability, in more-or-less the sense I describe here.
  • 3. John Vervake, Timothy P. Lillicrap, and Blake A. Richards, “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science↗︎︎,” Journal of Logic and Computation, Volume 22, Issue 1, February 2012, pp. 79–99.
  • 4. If you are coming from a cognitivist background, the flip may seem unsatisfactory here, as throughout the book. However, as we go along, I hope you will see that such observations turn out to be enough to help understand how to do rationality better.
  • 5. Confusingly, “natural” numbers are sometimes defined as starting with zero, and sometimes as starting with one. I chose zero arbitrarily here.
  • 6. I invented this dialog to illustrate a explanation. That can be dangerously misleading. Ethnomethodology’s power derives from its faithfulness to observations of specific people doing specific things in specific situations, which often reveal that activity doesn’t work like you’d expect. It would be much better for me to quote a recording of an actual conversation, with the video made available online, and with pointers to a hundred other similar conversations. In writing The Eggplant, I don’t have time for that. Most of the dialogs in the book are inventions. I apologize, and recommend that readers discount their value as evidence accordingly.
  • 7. If you are familiar with cognitive developmental theory, you will think here of the term “internalization,” and for example Lev Vygotsky’s classic Thought and Language↗︎︎. That’s what I’m alluding to.

Reasonableness is routine

Cracking an egg

Image courtesy↗︎︎ star5112

Reasonable↗︎︎ activity is mainly routine: familiar, practiced, ordinary, unproblematic. It goes pretty much as expected, so the details are not worth recalling or recounting.

Reasonable activity is responsive to unpredictable details of circumstances and events, but reliable enough that the overall outcome is usually successful and unremarkable. No guarantees, of course! Failures, breakdowns, and serendipity are possible.

Routine is too obvious to notice

Routine activity is ordinary, everyday, seemingly obvious; and so it is taken for granted, and as not worth mentioning, noticing, or investigating.

Immediately forgotten as uninteresting, routine is mainly unstudied and not theorized, and so taken to be trivial. This reinforces the notion that reasonableness is a weak sauce that should aspire to rationality↗︎︎.

Routineness does not imply that activity is mindless, mechanical, automatic, unconscious, pre-programmed, merely responding to stimuli, or lacking in thought.

No two eggs crack exactly the same way. The finger motions you make to open them have to be slightly different every time, guided by sight and touch. About one in three gets a bit of the white on your fingers or the stovetop or on the side of the pan, and you have to improvise a clean-up. Or a stray bit of eggshell gets in the scramble. Exactly how you scooped the eggshell out of the frying pan was perfectly clear and conscious as you did it, but you forget the details of the improvisation moments later. It’s not worth remembering, because the details were unique, a one-off pattern for that particular shell fragment; and because you are confident you can easily deal with similar but not identical fragments next time.

There is no method—only methods

The holy grail of rationalism↗︎︎ is a Master Method, the guaranteed correct algorithm for rational thought and action. There isn’t one. There also isn’t an algorithm for reasonableness, or for routine practical activity.

You have no algorithm for getting eggshell out of a scramble. You do whatever it takes. It’s likely to be a little different each time, but you don’t have to come up with some exciting innovation. It’s easy, because you can just see what to do. Reasonable methods are unenumerable. You could scoop it out with a fork, or a spoon, or tongs, or an eggcup, or your fingers, or another piece of eggshell.1 Such routine “methods” are typically themselves nebulous↗︎︎, not well-defined distinct procedures. You just look and see and do the next thing.

We’ll see in Part Four that this open-ended improvisational quality is ultimately true of rationality as well. Scientific breakthroughs often depend on duct tape.

Improvisation provides efficient generalization

Breakfast is not a problem, and so it doesn’t require difficult, principled thinking such as systematic rationality. That would be overkill and a great waste of effort. Using mathematical modeling to devise a precise procedure for egg cracking, reliable enough to never require improvisation or clean-up, would be absurd and irrational in your kitchen. It might be necessary if you are engineering a high-throughput egg separator for industrial prepared-food processing.

In routine activity, it is usually reasonable to assume that you can work out details as they come up, and that if you get something wrong, you’ll be able to compensate easily enough.

Relying on improvisation provides tacit generalization. Your intention to make an omelet covers an unenumerable space of unanticipated eventualities efficiently, without having to think them through in advance.

In contrast, a rational approach to generalization in the face of uncertainty involves explicit universal quantification. You model all the actions and events you consider possible, with all their possible outcomes, and choose the best ones. This is expensive (although sometimes justified).

Any rational analysis also depends on a closed-world idealization, implicitly ignoring the possibility of your breakfast being interrupted by an unexpected hippopotamus. (And what would you do then? You’d have to improvise.) The analysis can only be as good as the action effect model.

Trouble, repair, breakdown, meaninglessness, and rationality

The basic approach of routine, reasonable activity is to continue in the obvious way until you run into obvious trouble. That may not take long. If you watch videos of people doing routine work, it’s normal for there to be some glitch once every few seconds.

It’s also normal for the trouble to be immediately, easily, and routinely repaired. Usually you can see what went wrong, and how to fix it, so you suspend the task for a moment to make the repair, and then you go on. If “every few seconds” sounds like more trouble than you’d expect, it’s because these minor repairs are insignificant and unmemorable.

While making breakfast, you are likely to:

  • drop a fork on the grungy floor, pick it up and put it in the dishwasher, and then get a clean one from the drawer
  • leave the refrigerator door open by mistake so it starts beeping, so you go back and close it
  • splash a bit of milk out of the cereal bowl when it hits a cornflake at a bad angle, so you mop it up with a paper towel
  • nearly step on the cat, so you catch yourself and land your foot awkwardly instead
  • get some soapy water on your shirt while you’re washing the frypan, curse, and figure the shirt will dry out by itself

Most trouble is trivial, but occasionally it constitutes breakdown. Breakdown is trouble that you can’t see how to repair with routine methods. Some non-routine, non-obvious tack will be required, and you’ll have to figure that out somehow.

Occasional breakdown is inevitable, due to nebulosity, and also due to the “cross the river when you get there” approach. Your actions may have unanticipated bad effects; or factors entirely out of your control, such as hippopotami or irate housemates, may intervene. You may paint yourself into a corner. You may lose track of what you are doing and forget an important step.

It’s only when routine activity breaks down that it becomes noticeable and worthy of recall and report. Egg white gets on the pan handle, so when you pick it up the whole meal slips through your fingers and lands egg-side-down on the floor… Now you have a real problem! There’s a big mess, the kids are hungry, there isn’t time to start over, what are you going to do? You stare at it, paralyzed in blank dismay.

What becomes memorable, then, is routine’s atypical defects, not its typical smooth flow. This too can reinforce the misimpression that reasonableness is a defective approximation to rationality. “If only I had thought that through a bit better, before trying to pick the pan up by the slippery handle!”

Because the normally successful operation of routine reasonableness seems insignificant, rationalist theories of action are mainly theories of problem solving. They are about dealing with the atypical but significant condition of breakdown; of activity halting and your not knowing what to do. Rationalist theories take this not-knowing condition as being typical in the absence of systematic rationality. They understand the overall task of intelligent activity as devising proofs in advance that your actions will be correct or optimal, in order that breakdown can be avoided. These fantasies of control are usually unrealistic, unfortunately.2

Often systematic rationality is triggered by a breakdown in routine reasonableness, however. You’ll have to come up with some non-obvious fix, which will probably involve some new thinking. Routine activity is often mainly “knowing how” without “knowing that”; breakdowns can force explicit reflection that draws on theoretical knowledge. Rationality can be good for that.

Besides that, the “paralyzed blank stare” in the face of breakdown is interestingly similar to rationality’s attitude of disinterested objectivity. The former eggs have lost their meaning; they are no longer nearly breakfast; they have no purpose or inherent significance; they fit no category; they are a decontextualized mass of random atoms.3

However, rationality can also be routine, when you apply familiar systematic methods in familiar ways and they unproblematically yield the expected sorts of results.

Foreshadowing Part Four, meta-rationality is often triggered by a breakdown in routine rationality. When systematic methods fail, and you can see no rational way forward, it’s time to get meta-rational.

The other half of the analogy works, too. Just as the paralyzed blank stare of reasonableness breaking down resembles the disinterested objectivity of rationality, so too the floundering vertigo of rationality breaking down resembles the groundless open-ended curiosity of meta-rationality.

  • 1. Pro tip: I find using a large piece of eggshell as a scoop works best. They attract each other. I don’t know why.
  • 2. “A system that operates by constructing and executing plans lives, to speak metaphorically, in a sort of fantasy world, the one it projects when it reasons about its future actions. In this way, the system believes that it has a kind of control over its world that, at least in many domains, is not realistic. When things do not work out as projected, the system is surprised. An improvising agent, by contrast, does not live its life through an alternation between fantasy and surprise. It does not believe that it has complete control over its world. Instead, through a continual give-and-take with its environment, creatively making use of opportunities and contingencies, it participates in the forms of activity that its world affords.” Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, “What are plans for?↗︎︎,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6:1–2 (1990), pp. 17–34.
  • 3. This connection between breakdown and objectivity was first noted by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time↗︎︎. Its relevance for cognitive science was developed by Hubert Dreyfus in several works, including Being-in-the-World↗︎︎.

Meaningful perception

Raven

All ravens are black. Image courtesy↗︎︎ Casey Horner

Understanding perception as meaning-saturated resolves several of the difficulties Part One found rationalism↗︎︎ faces.

Recall from “Is this an eggplant which I see before me?” that the usual rationalist assumption is that perception’s job is to deliver an objective description of your physical environment. “Objective” would mean that it is independent of your theories, of your projects, and of anything that cannot be sensed at this moment, such as recent events. We saw that, for several in-principle reasons, this seems impossible.

Fortunately, that isn’t what we need from perception. In routine, practical activity, what we want perception to tell us is: what are the meaningful aspects of the situation we’re in right now? And what possibilities for ongoing activity do they suggest? The answers depend on what we know, what we can do, what we’re are up to right now, and what else is going on.

Unsurprisingly, then, scientific study of perception shows that it does not attempt to deliver objective descriptions; and shows how perception does operate on a task-dependent, contextual, meaning-saturated and knowledge-saturated basis.

The science is fascinating, and I’d love to review it in detail here, but that would take another book.1 Instead, I will explain just enough that you can understand how routine, reasonable activity cooperates with perception to address issues that rationality unaided cannot.

I will discuss only vision, because it’s the most important human sense, and the best understood scientifically. In this chapter, we’ll return to questions posed in “Is this an eggplant I see before me?↗︎︎” There we asked: what is the interface between perception and rationality? Here, our question will be: what is the interface between vision and reasonable activity? What is the division of labor? And the answer will be that they are intimately entwined, with no hard boundary between them. Seeing is an aspect of doing, not a separate, encapsulated function. This implies that what we perceive is, for better or worse, inevitably affected by what we are up to at the time.

Rationality also depends on perception, of course. We use perception in building objective, rational theories. However, this use is mediated through reasonableness, which limits how objective theories can be—as we’ll see in Part Three.

In Part Three, we’ll also come to understand how the nature and limits of perception and cognition force the rather awkward ways formal rationality must work in the material world. As a hint: how much of your technical, rational work could you do if you were blindfolded? Which parts can you do without looking at a computer screen or at your lab equipment?2 What does that tell you about the nature of rationality?

Seeing is routine purposeful activity

Seeing is work we do, not something that just happens. This is not obvious, because most visual activity is routine, rapid, effortless, and reliable. So, as with other routines, we don’t particularly notice what we’re doing, and instantly forget it. However, visual work is partly conscious, and can be made more so with a little attention and practice.

In rare situations, the visual task is difficult. As with other routine activities, the trouble you experience reveals something about what’s going on. The machinery’s operation becomes obvious only when it doesn’t work. So we’ll look at examples of visually difficult situations: messes and video games.

Eye movements are the most obvious, easiest to understand manifestation of visual activity. Typically, our eyes flick around several times per second, and you can become fully aware of these motions just by paying a bit of attention.3

You can see in an instant—about a quarter of a second, actually—that the photograph below shows a mess. Figuring out what it is a mess of takes a lot of work. Your eyes have to center each object separately to see what it is. You may have to stare at some items for a full second to figure out what they are. It’s somewhat unusual to feel a sense of visual effort; I’ve chosen this picture in hopes that you can experience that. You could probably spend thirty seconds on this image and still be working out some details.

This image is difficult because the objects are meaningless out of context. They have no purpose; there are no contextual clues as to why they are jumbled together like this. The deer vertebra, right at the center, would make sense as part of a skeleton, but what it is it doing here?

In a routine arrangement of familiar objects, you can take in an overview at once, and get the impression that you’ve seen the whole thing in detail; but actually you just know now where you’d need to look to see specifics, because you already know what everything means.

Table set for dinner

I forced myself to pay attention and spent more than sixty seconds looking at this photo. I kept finding new things I’d missed, some of them rather mysterious!

Learning to see

336

Artwork courtesy↗︎︎ Ninjatic

Because most of life is routine, and most objects and situations are mostly familiar, and because we’ve practiced our visual skills from early childhood, they suffice for most tasks, and go unnoticed. Needing to learn new visual skills is unusual for adults.

Some video games are an outstanding exception. Video games are designed to make learning new skills fun, and many games teach you to see in new ways. When you enter a new segment of the game, everything is happening much too fast; you have no idea where to look or what it means. Enemies come out of nowhere and kill you before you even see what they are. With practice, you learn to see things you couldn’t before, because you didn’t know how.

Creepy dungeon passageway

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Evelyn Chai

You are sneaking along a gloomy passageway in the necromancer’s tower. Suddenly you die. WTF just happened??

You reload the game from the last save point.

You are sneaking along that passageway and out of the corner of your eye you see something violent happen on left side of the screen and then you die. You reload.

You are sneaking along, looking left, and a golem leaps out of the archway on your left side and kills you.

This time, you’re watching the archway cautiously, and when the golem leaps out you hit it with a lightning bolt. A moment later, something happens on the right and you die.

Next try, you zap the golem with a lightning bolt, you flick your eyes right, and as the tomb over there opens, you manage to get one of the zombies with a fireball. But another one kills you. You noticed that the headless zombie hesitated for a moment before attacking.

You zap the golem and incinerate the one-arm zombie with a fireball while the headless one gropes around. You cartwheel to dodge its attack, and finish it off with a mid-air flying dagger thrust. Awesomeness! Unfortunately the floorboards you land on are rotten and you fall through to your death.

… An hour later, you stroll through the tower, knocking off monsters and skipping traps without really thinking about it, because you have learned to perceive the meanings of routine necromantic phenomena. Archways harbor golems, zombies without heads can’t see, rotten floorboards are a bit darker than solid ones. Now you know what to look out for, and where to look to see it.

You whack the necromancer, collect the Thingamabob Of Destiny, and return to the College of Wizards to get your next homework assignment.

Seeing with a purpose

Vision is not an “input device” like a digital camera connected to a computer. In that set-up, causality flows in only one direction, from the photons arriving at the sensor through various stages of processing to the cable connecting the camera to the computer. A camera delivers “objective” information in the sense that it’s the same regardless of what program the computer is running. In vision research, this is called bottom-up information flow. It delivers fixed information in a single format, regardless of what you want.

Extensive evidence from multiple fields shows that human vision also involves top-down information flow.4 Conscious reasoning processes can causally affect which visual information gets processed at the lower, pre-conscious stages, and how. Most obviously, you can choose what to look at by moving your eyes.

There are many other ways you can direct your own visual processing. One that has been studied in great detail is visual attention.5 If you fix your gaze direction to look at one small object for several seconds, you can still “look around the room,” transferring your attention to other objects in sequence, even if they are quite far out in peripheral vision and you can’t see them all that clearly. (Try this now!)

Experiments show that visual attention significantly affects what you see. You are much more likely to notice and identify details and events at the location you are attending to than elsewhere in your peripheral vision. Further, you are more likely to correctly identify brief events if you know what you are looking for. In the necromancer’s tower, you may learn that coffin lids twist slightly, a second before they open and a skeleton pops out. That gives you time to prepare a fireball spell, so you watch for this slight motion out of the corner of your eye.

As with other visual phenomena, the importance of attention becomes obvious only in difficult tasks. A series of experiments asked subjects to count the number of times basketballs were passed among a group of people who were also moving in complicated patterns.6 Because the subjects were closely attending basketball passes, they were “blind” to other information that was objectively available. The specifics of this are startling, and I don’t want to give them away. To experience the effect for yourself, I encourage you to watch a one-minute film by visual psychologist Daniel Simons, available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo↗︎︎. If you are familiar with this experiment, or find it too easy, try the advanced version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY↗︎︎.

What we’ve learned from visual psychology suggests that seeing involves learned, task-specific skills. It is contextual and purposive, which makes it a good fit for everyday, reasonable, routine activity. (And not such a great fit for objective rationality.)

Visual activity is not separate from the rest of what we’re doing. The phrase “hand-eye coordination” points at this. In video games, your visual actions that tell your bottom-up vision what to do are just as much part of the skill of fighting a group of monsters as swinging your sword is. Shifts of visual attention, for instance, are seamlessly integrated with the rest of the killing dance. As a more mundane example, if you are looking for scissors, you’ll move your head as well as your eyes to check around the desk, shove clutter out of the way to see behind or beneath it, and eventually get up and go open a drawer and peer inside. Visual activity and bodily motions are entangled.

Bottom-up and top-down processing interact in complex ways. For example, sudden movements get noticed automatically, bottom-up. This makes evolutionary sense in an environment with predators, prey, and potentially hostile people. In the necromancer’s tower, you saw that something was jumping out and killing you before you could see what it was.

Also bottom-up, your visual system automatically recognizes familiar objects if it’s given a few more milliseconds. Only when you see something peculiar do you need to figure out what it is by looking harder, more deliberately.

Seeing with an ontology

Raven

All ravens are black. Image courtesy↗︎︎ Mary Lewandowski

Much of what you see, you see as something. You don’t see a textured black region of the visual image, you see a loudspeaker. Or a raven. It’s already a loudspeaker or a raven when you first experience it.7 Bottom-up vision has done that work for you.

What you see something as depends on your knowledge, context, and purposes. If you are familiar with moussaka and you see it on a plate in a restaurant, you’ll probably see it as moussaka. If you aren’t, you’ll probably see it as a mushy casserole. You can’t see it as moussaka, because that’s not part of your ontology↗︎︎. If you see moussaka on a city sidewalk, you might just see it as disgusting, potentially pathogenic slop that you want to avoid. What you see a clump of atoms as depends on what you are looking out for, and why. Although bottom-up processes can do much of the work for you, especially in the case of rigid manufactured objects like loudspeakers with standard shapes and colors, your top-down direction often also plays a critical role.8

Because perception evolved to enable purposeful activities, most of the time it reveals meaningful functions and potentials. Those are a matter of ontology: not just categories, but also how you separate the world into objects; what properties you see them having; and how they relate to each other. It’s not just objects, but also intentions, actions, events, environments, and possibilities. In context, you see someone kneeling as worship; someone running out of a store as shoplifting; and items on a restaurant table as a dinner setting, not a silverware collection. And, as in Simons’ films, you may simply never see things that aren’t meaningful.

Routine activity is easy because most of the time we can see what to do. We see affordances—cues as to what actions are possible, and what their effects will be. When it’s time for a snack, looking around inside the refrigerator reveals what you feel like eating. Noticing a coffin-lid twisting is inseparable from recognizing the danger and the need to get a spell ready. We can, in effect, see into the future.

Logical positivism sought to eliminate the “theory-ladenness” of perception, because it biases evidence. That’s impossible, but for most purposes it’s also undesirable. Usually, seeing meaning is useful, and not a mistake. Sometimes, however, it does skew our understanding, and stripping meaning helps. We’ll see in Part Three that this is a function of technical rationality, and we’ll explore some ways of accomplishing it.

Seeing nebulosity

Olde Speckled Hen

Non-black non-raven↗︎︎, courtesy↗︎︎ Davee

Perception is inherently nebulous↗︎︎, and you can’t fully denebulize it.

You can see at a glance that this is a picture of a speckled hen.9 But how many speckles can you see? Certainly more than ten, and less than a thousand. If you wanted a more precise number… you’d have to count them individually, shifting your visual attention to each in turn. So what do you perceive before doing that? A nebulous number of speckles.10

Look closer… some speckles are quite well-defined, but others fade out gradually, run into each other, or are not clearly speckles at all. You cannot count them after all. The number is itself nebulous. Perception is nebulous because reality is nebulous. This is an ontological issue, not an epistemological↗︎︎ one. You are prevented from knowing the number of speckles not because just your perceptual abilities are limited and unreliable, but because there is no definite number.

You need to see precisely enough only to accomplish your task. If you spill coffee on the carpet, it makes a splotch with an indefinite boundary. The puddle fades around the edges as wicking action transports the liquid along fibers. You cannot see exactly where the mess ends. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter. You mop it up with paper towels, and then soak it with hot water from a sponge, and then dry it with paper towels again. You don’t have to cut the towels to precisely fit the shape of the splotch. You can just press a wad of sheets down on the floor to cover the general area.

It seems that we have access to perceptual processing at many different abstraction levels. There is no crisp, fixed “neutral observation vocabulary,” as the logical positivists hoped, because there are few if any objective, non-nebulous macroscopic properties to be perceived.

Ravens are black. Or are they?

Raven

Image courtesy↗︎︎ George Hodan

If you pay closer attention to the color, you can see it more accurately. It helps to get physically closer to the bird, but even at a constant distance, visual effort makes a difference. You may be able to see that some parts of the bird are dark matte gray. Others are iridescent with purple, blue, and green highlights. As your vision penetrates the depths of the colors, they may come to seem intense and vivid. How could you have ever have seen ravens as black?

To get an objective measurement of color, you can use a spectrophotometer. The instrument’s use is quite limited, however. The spectrum reflected from an object depends on the incoming light. That must be controlled by putting the object in an opaque box to shield it from random lighting, and illuminating it with a well-characterized source instead. Further, “an object” does not have a color; remember the speckling of the hen and the streakiness of an apple. In practice, spectrophotometers are used only to measure small samples of homogeneous materials, typically chemicals that you have just made.

Many professions develop specialized skills of seeing. This includes science. In Part Three, we’ll look at an example of a chemistry professor teaching graduate students to judge when to stop a reaction by closely observing its exact quality of blackness.

  • 1. A recent review of relevant research, from point of view of human vision, is Carrick C. Williams and Monica S. Castelhano, “The Changing Landscape: High-Level Influences on Eye Movement Guidance in Scenes↗︎︎,” Vision 3 (2019), 33. From point of view of robotics and computer vision, by pioneers in the field, see Ruzena Bajcsy, Yiannis Aloimonos, and John K. Tsotsos, “Revisiting active perception↗︎︎,” Autonomous Robots 42 (2018), pp. 177–196. John Findlay and Iain D. Gilchrist’s Active Vision: The Psychology of Looking and Seeing↗︎︎ (2003) covers many of the issues I discuss here in more detail than the review articles.
  • 2. With enough practice, you could learn to do far more of it. There are highly competent, productive, fully blind programmers, for example.
  • 3. This is also the easiest aspect of human active vision to study scientifically, because eye tracking apparatus can determine where you are looking, with high precision, as you move your eyes around. See the Williams and Castelhano article cited above for entry points into this literature.
  • 4. Again the Williams and Castelhano article is a good starting point if you’d like to learn more about top-down direction of active vision.
  • 5. What I’ll describe here is called “covert visual attention” in the literature, as opposed to “overt,” which is moving your eyes. The Findlay and Gilchrist book cited above covers this in detail.
  • 6. Many video games, similarly, force visual difficulty by requiring you to track multiple moving objects.
  • 7. The classic discussion of “seeing as” is in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎. It’s pp. 203ff in the 2009 Fourth Edition.
  • 8. Alexandre Linhares’ “A glimpse at the metaphysics of Bongard problems↗︎︎” provides a clear and sophisticated philosophical discussion. Artificial Intelligence 121 (2000) pp. 251–270.
  • 9. Well, Wikimedia says↗︎︎ this is a speckled Sussex hen, named Mata Hari. She looks like a rooster to me; but enforcing outdated avian gender norms is not on my agenda.
  • 10. This is a venerable philosophical example↗︎︎, originally posed to A.J. Ayer by Gilbert Ryle, but first discussed in print by Roderick Chisholm in “The Problem of the Speckled Hen,” Mind 51 (1942), pp. 368-373.

The purpose of meaning

… is to get stuff done.

Breakfast table with croissants and jam

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Mariana Medvedeva

The typical rationalist↗︎︎ view is that the purpose of language is to state facts and theories.1

Prototypes for these uses might be “the mass of solar system object #134340 is (1.303±0.003)×1022 kilograms” (a fact about Pluto) and “congruent parts of congruent polygons are congruent” (a theorem of Euclidean geometry). The logical positivists discovered that language was bad at stating truths (for the many reasons we covered in Part One), declared it broken, and adopted mathematical logic instead.

But that is mostly not what language is for. Nor would we be better off if it were. Stating truths is only occasionally useful, and usually only as a means for accomplishing something else. Language is not a defective approximation to an ideal formal language.

Language is the right tool for dealing with the kind of world we live in: one that is nebulous↗︎︎, localized, and meaning-saturated.2 It is not that we should admit everyday language is “good enough” in the sense that—although a properly precise language would be better—everyday language is minimally adequate and is for some reason all that is available; or what ordinary people use out of foolishness or ignorance. It is precisely adapted to its proper function, which is getting reasonable↗︎︎ work done.

Let’s consider an alternative prototype of language. I was having breakfast with a friend, she noticed I was looking around the tabletop, she said “jam?”, I nodded, and she passed it to me.

Different prototypes lead to different ontologies↗︎︎ and understandings. Starting from “congruent parts of congruent polygons are congruent” leads naturally to an ontology of propositions, beliefs, truth values, logical quantifiers, and “meanings” of sentences composed from the meanings of their parts. None of those metaphysical spooks are relevant to “jam?”. It is not a proposition or belief; has no truth value, parts, or quantifiers; and has no meaning out of context.

The logical positivists hoped to start from a theory of meaning developed for mathematics and extend it first to science, then to other academic subjects, and finally to rectify the language and thought of ordinary people.

The Eggplant performs an ethnomethodological flip, and aims in the opposite direction. We’ll start from the ordinary use of “jam?”, and develop first an ontology that covers reasonable activity broadly (in Part Two), and then an understanding of science and mathematics (in Part Three).3

This may seem backward: if we want to understand science, shouldn’t we start there? But as human beings, we don’t start with science. As babies, we start with people feeding us. Our ability to science rests on our ability to breakfast, and that’s where our understanding of sciencing has to start too.

Jam?

Here are some features of “jam?” that we’ll take as prototypical of reasonable language:

  • Speaking the word was a part of observable, concrete activity, involving two particular people on a particular occasion in a particular place.4 This contrasts with the rationalist prototype of sentences as nonphysical sequences of words, not spoken, written, heard, or read by anyone in particular, but existing in a formal realm outside of time and space.

  • The meaning of “jam?” is entirely dependent on the material and social context and on the purposes of the participants. It would mean something somewhat different if it were a waiter speaking, and radically different if it was the CEO of a condiments company quizzing the CFO about the monthly financial performance report. The meaning might not even have anything to do with jam (as we’ll see later in this chapter).

  • “Jam?” was a tool used in the course of a collaborative activity. Whereas rationalism implicitly takes cognition as typically solitary and in service of individual goals, our view will be that human activity is almost always social. Even when you are in a room by yourself, what you are doing is usually meaningful only as a part of ongoing group activities.

  • “Jam?” was surrounded and made meaningful by nonlinguistic, physical interactions (my glancing around and her passing me the jam). Language is, prototypically, interwoven with the rest of life, not a separate domain.

  • “Jam?” was a tentative account for the meaning of my gaze direction, which I accepted with a nod. Accounts given within a situation explain the current meaning of the situation, but then also become themselves part of the ongoing situation, and subsequent activity typically takes them into account.

Is there any water in the refrigerator?

A: Is there any water in the refrigerator?
B: Yes.
A: Where? I don’t see it.
B: In the cells of the eggplant.

Was “there is water in the refrigerator” true?

It depends.

And, it’s the wrong question. “True” and “false”—in the rationalist sense—are rarely meaningful or relevant in concrete activity.

“Is there any water in the refrigerator?” means different things depending on why you are asking. If A is looking for something to drink, the answer “yes” is… maybe not false, exactly, but definitely wrong. It might be technically true, but it’s not meaningfully or usefully true.

More to the point, it’s unreasonable. It’s accountably unhelpful, deceitful, irritating, and stupid.5 It’s apparently a failed attempt at a put-down joke, prioritizing B’s social status motivation above A’s practical one. It violates norms, and it would be reasonable for A to tell B off.

On the other hand, if A and B are in a biochemistry lab, and A is intending to store a reagent that degrades in the presence of trace quantities of water, B’s reply might be a helpful warning: an eggplant releases tiny amounts of water vapor into the air, making the refrigerator too moist for this use.

“In the cells of the eggplant” might also be a reasonable answer even if A is looking for something to drink. Perhaps the two have been lost in the desert and come across an abandoned shack with no running water… but there’s a scraggly eggplant bush growing in the broken, doorless refrigerator lying on its back on the ground. “We’re saved! Squeeze it out!”

There are, in other words, unenumerable contextual factors that could make a “yes” or “no” answer the reasonable one. Each of these depends on one’s background understanding of what is relevant and why.

Anything anyone says to you has unenumerably many possible meanings, but usually you hear only one, and it’s usually the right one. Just as seeing-as allows you to visually perceive the meanings of material objects and events, hearing-as allows you to perceive the meanings of linguistic utterances. (And reading-as allows you to perceive the meanings of written language.) In the case of vision, I could sketch a mechanistic theory of how that may work. For language understanding, I don’t think cognitive science has much to offer.6 Fortunately, The Eggplant is not about things-in-your-head. Instead, we can rely on what I jokingly call:

The Fundamental Theorem of Ethnomethodology: Participants in an interaction recognize its meaning without looking inside each others’ heads; therefore we as theorists can too.7

In most situations, we recognize that someone asking “is there any water in the refrigerator” wants to drink it, and we are not aware of considering other possible meanings. Discussions of this phenomenon often use the word “interpretation,” which is useful but potentially misleading.

  • “Interpretation” is often taken to be subjective. There’s “what the sentence objectively means” and then there’s “your interpretation,” which is a mere opinion. (This impression may be left over from high school English teachers explaining some simplistic theory about how to read poems.) This suggests that the objective, literal meaning is genuinely true or false, but interpretations are squishy and metaphorical, so they aren’t really meaningful and should probably be ignored by anyone who’s rational.8 But the objective/subjective distinction isn’t helpful here. In most situations, every reasonable observer would agree that “is there any water in the refrigerator” means “water to drink,” and this is as objective an account as is possible. Insisting that the “objective meaning” is “at least one water molecule” is not rational; it’s irrational.

  • “Interpretation” is often taken as “processing” of language itself, with context sometimes brought in as an afterthought to disambiguate if necessary. It seems instead that we perceive the overall meaning of an activity ongoingly, and fit whatever anyone says into that contextual meaning.9 Language interpretation is not a distinct process subject to its own rules. It’s an inseparable part of the whole activity, so we bring the unenumerable relevancies to bear. It’s necessarily improvisational and one-off in the same way all merely-reasonable activity is.

  • “Interpretation” is normally understood as explicitly reasoning about possible alternatives. Those may be involved in some unconscious process, but ambiguities are rarely noticed, much less reasoned about, consciously.

  • “Interpretation” is not mainly a matter of choosing between well-defined alternatives, even if unconsciously. A rationalist might say that “water” has several distinct meanings, and it is absolutely true that there is waterchemical in the fridge but absolutely false that there is waterdrinking. The next section addresses this argument.10

The eggplant is a straw hat

Linguists recognize that words have different meanings in different contexts. They distinguish three phenomena: polysemy, metonymy, and metaphor. If a word has several standard, distinct meanings, selected by context, that is polysemy. If a word with one meaning is used to refer to something else that is associated with it in some way, that is metonymy. If a word is used to refer to something else that is similar in some way, that is metaphor. Are these valid, separate categories?

One dictionary lists, among several meanings of “fruit,” “any product of plant growth useful to humans”; “the developed ovary of a seed plant”; and “the edible part of a plant developed from a flower.” In “the eggplant is a fruit,” which one is the meaning? This does not seem a meaningful question. The meanings run into each other; they are not clearly distinct. Polysemy is not a useful framing; but neither metonymy nor metaphor is involved either.

“An eggplant dish” might be analyzed as metonymy: the china container is used to refer to its contents. Or, it might be analyzed as polysemy: some dictionaries give “a particular preparation of food” as a meaning of “dish.” “The fruit of your labors” might be analyzed as a metaphor (the poem you wrote is the delicious product of an organic growth process you nurtured), or as polysemy (some dictionaries list “anything produced or accruing” as one meaning of “fruit”).

So polysemy, metonymy, and metaphor are all nebulous and run into each other. (Speaking of running, the Oxford English Dictionary’s’s 645 different definitions of “run”—mentioned in Part One—can’t represent 645 different concepts. They are different ways of using the word in different contexts, but not clearly distinct.) “Polysemy, metonymy, metaphor” may be useful for analyzing poetry, but seem dubious in understanding everyday language use.

Let’s start over. We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.

Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game… How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling about politics”?

We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room.

A homophobic waiter might say “the eggplant is a fruit,” meaning “ostentatiously gay”—and a gay waiter might say and mean the same thing, but with a side serving of irony.

We naturally use whatever words are adequately unambiguous and obvious in context to describe things for which “literal, objective” terms would be ambiguous, unavailable, or inconvenient. It doesn’t matter what “the word means”; it matters that the right customer gets their moussaka.

Hearing the meaning of “is there any water in the refrigerator?” is not a matter of determining which type of water was asked about, waterdrinking or waterchemical. If you want to be helpful, you need to know what the questioner wants to accomplish. Unenumerable factors of the situation are relevant to that—rather than to “disambiguating the word.” It may matter, for instance, just how thirsty they are, and what they like to drink:

Is there any water in the refrigerator?
Yes.
Where?
Oh, I meant the lemonade, I figured that would do. It’s not very strong.

There is no algorithm, no general method, for interpretation. You improvise using whatever resources are ready to hand. There’s nothing magic about this; it’s mundane and obvious stuff we do constantly, mostly without even noticing. But no human capacity or activity is not potentially involved.

  • 1. There are exceptions: the rationalist speech act theory, which began with J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words↗︎︎, covers other uses of language. Speech act theory formalizes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s meta-rational understanding of language. Unfortunately, it misses one key point: most uses of language are reasonable↗︎︎, not rational↗︎︎, so unenumerable considerations and methods become relevant to their interpretation in context, and that interpretation is unavoidably nebulous. Speech act theory may be valuable for understanding uses of language in rationally structured institutional situations such as management or law.
  • 2. This was a main point of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎. Logic might be the right tool if we lived in a world made of meaningless discrete macroscopic objects with definite properties, but we don’t. Logic is occasionally useful in situations in which the world is sufficiently like that, and in which the difficulties logic clarifies, such as quantifier scope, are significant.
  • 3. This general plan follows the lead of the ethnomethodological “Studies of Work” program, but my execution may not be faithful to its details.
  • 4. Le Pain Quotidien in Marylebone, if you must know. They do good jam.
  • 5. “In the cells of the eggplant” is an unreasonable and annoying answer if given by an adult. If B is a child, it might be clever and amusing. Unenumerable aspects of the context are relevant to the meaning of the answer, and how one can reasonably respond to it.
  • 6. Some psycholinguistics researchers may disagree.
  • 7. This is not technically a theorem, and it’s not formulated exactly as ethnomethodologists would. Also, it is true only to the extent that “we as theorists” have the relevant background knowledge. In ethnomethodology, this is called “the unique adequacy requirement.” You can’t understand what a molecular biologist is doing unless you know enough molecular biology. This is a failing of most social science studies of other sciences. An anthropologist who doesn’t know what a restriction enzyme is will inevitably miss the point.
  • 8. John Searle’s “Literal Meaning↗︎︎” thoroughly refutes this notion. Erkenntnis 13 (1978) pp. 207-224.
  • 9. My use of Winograd and Flores’ refrigerator story has been misleading in presenting language use without context. On the other hand, the full context can never be specified, so “correctly” presenting examples of reasonable activity is impossible after the fact. Situations can ultimately only be participated in, not frozen and collected as static objects for analysis.
  • 10. Also see Terry Winograd’s “Moving the semantic fulcrum↗︎︎,” Linguistics and Philosophy, 8:1 (1985), pp. 91-104.

How we refer

Forklift with operator

Forklift operator courtesy↗︎︎ Brooke Winters

In Part One, I described reference as “rationalism’s reality problem.” How does a belief connect with the thing it is about?

Rationalism↗︎︎ proposes a correspondence relation, mediated by propositions. Analysis showed that these are necessarily non-physical. Correspondence and propositions are metaphysical entities without causal power; they might as well be a system of magic mediated by obliging fairies. I promised to provide an alternative, naturalistic understanding of reference.

In this chapter, we’ll perform an ethnomethodological flip. We’ll replace rationalism’s metaphysical questions about how reference works in theory with concrete observations of the everyday hassle of achieving references in practice.1

Part Three will rely on this chapter’s explanation to understand how we use mere reasonableness↗︎︎ to connect systematic rationality↗︎︎ with reality. This chapter also sets up for a discussion of reasonable instruction use, which Part Three relies on to understand how we perform rational procedures.

Stupid referring tricks

In a naturalistic account, physical things refer. Principally, physical people refer. We have to do the job that the correspondence theory attributed to metaphysical fairies. Reference is a task that we achieve with concrete work over time in a specific situation for a specific purpose.

According to tradition, high correspondence magic is extraordinarily elegant, and the fairies are astonishingly beautiful; but they are only visible to highly-trained philosophers.2 Nice for them.

The rest of us have to get by with stupid referring tricks.3 We don’t know any general method for referring, so not only do we have to do the fairies’ work for them, we have to figure out how each time. This involves actual work, actually doing things, not “mental computation.” We resort to ungainly, amateurish kludges. Sometimes they’re one-offs that work just well enough to get a job done before falling apart. We’ve seen one example already: referring to a restaurant patron as “the straw hat.”

The rest of this chapter is a collection of stupid referring tricks.4 Referring is accomplished by whatever means is available, and improvised methods are unenumerable, so there can’t be any systematic theory or rational taxonomy of reference, only an unsystematic catalog of special cases.

We’ll mostly look at referring accomplished by spoken language, because that’s observable. The theory will be that written language, and also unobservable referrings, such as by beliefs, work pretty much the same way.

Good enough referring

The Spanish Inquisition” explained how the open-ended richness of reality, with its unenumerable potentially relevant details, defeats rationalism.

In “The National Omelet Registry,” we saw that propositions, since they live in a context-free Neverland outside of space and time, have difficulty relating to beliefs like “that dog is digging up the garden.” Which dog?

Referring is possible only because the specificity of our purposes limit relevance. We don’t go around referring to arbitrary sets of atoms or random regions of spacetime. In everyday activity, we only want to refer to something because it’s relevant to our purposes. The way in which it is relevant usually provides adequate resources for referring.

Reasonable purposes are never absolute. Good enough is good enough. Sort-of truth is generally all we need. That’s good because it’s generally all we can get. An omelet doesn’t need to come out perfectly (if that were even meaningful); it only needs to look and taste good enough.

Spoken language referring is adequately accomplished if the hearer can adequately determine the referent when the time comes. What counts as “adequately” depend on the purpose of the activity.

The forklift operator approaches the building foreman with a load of drywall. “Yeah, put it over there,” says the foreman, nodding in the general direction of an empty bit of the construction site. Where exactly is “there”? What are its boundaries? How does the forklift driver know whether she’s dumped it in the right place? It doesn’t matter. The foreman probably has only a nebulous↗︎︎ “there” in mind, anyway. All that matters is to put it somewhere out of the way but easily available when it will be needed tomorrow.

If someone exclaims “the President of Burkina Fasso has been shot!” you may or may not need to know who specifically that is for reference to have been accomplished. It depends on how and whether and why you care.

If you are making breakfast on your first day in an AirBnB kitchen and think “I’ll use the eggbeater,” you haven’t accomplished reference until you’ve rooted through several drawers full of clutter and found it. If you can’t, “the eggbeater” was a failed attempt at referring.

A referring expression only has to be specific enough to get the job done, here, this time. How, as the speaker, do you know how specific that is? Referring may be analyzed as giving instructions for how to access the referent. Referring is more a matter of knowing-how than knowing-that. You’ve generally got a pretty good sense of the hearer’s know-how, because it’s pretty much the same as yours. But you can’t always get this right, and the hearer won’t always get it right. If it doesn’t work, you repair by trying again: “No, the other one.”

Referring relative to the context

Hudsonian Godwit

Hudsonian Godwit, courtesy↗︎︎ JJ Harrison

Referring is always context-dependent.5 This is a brute fact of physics. There is no absolute coordinate system, no (0, 0, 0) point to start from, and no Cosmic Eggbeater Registry assigning unique identification numbers. You could try to refer to this eggbeater by a description you hope is unique in the entire universe, but that would require an unwieldy amount of detail. Exactly which features distinguish this eggbeater from every other eggbeater? And how can you be sure? You could check every eggbeater on the planet, but can you be absolutely certain there is no similar one somewhere else in the universe? Unenumerable galaxies potentially containing eggbeaters are potentially relevant.

In this kitchen, here, where you and I are, there is probably only one eggbeater. If I say “pass the eggbeater,” you know which one I mean. This is highly efficient; I don’t have to find a unique description for it, and neither of us has to know its serial number. Plus, the single simple expression “the eggbeater” automatically gets the job done in pretty much any kitchen. I don’t need to figure out a different way of referring to each different eggbeater each time.

Ultimately, all referring has to be relative to me. I’m here, now, and that defines the context. I’m doing this, and that defines the purpose. You are you, not just Julius Quimby Alexis Featherstonehaugh IX, because I’m talking to you now. The eggbeater you hand me is the eggbeater because it’s the one I’m going to use.

So “the” is a referring trick, the simplest one. We are not always so lucky that there is an obvious, unique thing that we might be referring to. What then?

Referring is feasible only because the difficulties posed by unenumerable details of a situation are offset by the richness of the unenumerable tools available in that same situation. We can exploit those for stupid tricks.

Here’s one: referring to an object relative to another one that is easier to refer to.

“That’s a Hudsonian godwit!” says the more experienced birder, gesturing toward a mixed-species group of sandpipers wading in the shallows. “Which?” asks the less experienced one. “Just to the left of that piece of driftwood? … I mean, the log sticking out of the sandbar into the bay?” “Oh! Wow! Yeah, I see the godwit now!”

This took three tries. The less experienced birder couldn’t immediately pick out the exciting individual from the flock of similar waders. But it’s just left of that piece of driftwood. Which piece? The one sticking out of the sandbar.

Unenumerable tricks

Let’s go through a bunch of stupid referring tricks quickly. Our job here is just to get a sense of their diversity, not to do proper ethnomethodology, much less science.

  • Pointing is a common way of referring. I’ve given two examples above already: the foreman nodding “over there” and the birder gesturing at the flock.

  • Looking is a common way of finding a referent. You can locate and grasp the mouse on your desk without even taking your eyes away from the screen. (Note how you shifted your visual attention to it, though!) If someone tells you there’s water in the refrigerator, you poke around inside to find it.

  • “Yikes!” I yell. You are playing a video game you are new to, and I’m an expert watching over your shoulder. “Yikes!” refers to the thing that just happened: it was significantly bad, in a way I suspect you don’t recognize. Describing what it was might be complicated, and the time taken would blur the instant. A sharp “Yikes!” refers to right then. It’s like pointing, but in time rather than space.

  • Names are a common way of referring. Names don’t have to be absolutely unique. You may be the only Julius Quimby Alexis Featherstonehaugh IX, on this planet at least, but there’s plenty of John Smiths, and that only rarely gives them trouble. There are many dogs named “Samantha,” but probably only one in your neighborhood, and that’s usually good enough.

  • I refer to my car just as “my car”: relative to me, but via possession rather than location. I know which one it is. It’s not likely I’d get it confused with someone else’s, especially because it’s old enough to have some distinctive dents on it.

  • Still, it has a unique Vehicle Identification Number, mandated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Labeling is a way of modifying objects to make them easier to refer to. The VIN is stamped on the car in several places. I don’t remember what it is, but if it came to an ownership dispute, I could look it up.

  • Conversely, it’s wise to ensure that indistinguishable (or nearly indistinguishable) objects are causally equivalent (or sufficiently so). If every machine screw was unique, it would cause a lot of trouble. Ones with different thread pitches had better have pitches that are different enough that it’s easy to tell them apart.

  • And you’d do well to keep screws of similar sizes in separate containers. More generally, keep everything in its proper place, so you can refer to “the serving dish on the top shelf.”

  • You can delay locating a referent. If you are told “turn right at the ornate Vietnamese restaurant and then the theater will be a couple blocks down on the left,” you won’t recognize “the restaurant” or “the theater” until you get to them.

  • You can delegate the ability to locate a referent to someone else. If you remember reading that Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Fasso, you know that fact, even though you might not have a clue where you were if you were parachuted into it. “Um, excuse me, where am I?” “Ouagadougou, mais ici on parle français!”

  • You can delegate referring itself, including to inanimate objects acting as your proxy. Writing instructions is an example.

  • As with all things reasonable, referring can’t be guaranteed to work. If it fails, as in other routine activity, one can usually repair it. “Pick up the amulet,” I advise, watching over your shoulder as you play the sword-and-sorcery game. And then, as you head in the wrong direction, “No, the other one!”6 I wrongly assumed you knew that one was cursed; I meant the one on the left, not the one on the right.

  • Cognitive science assumes that beliefs are mental representations. There’s problems with that idea, but let’s go with it for a moment. We don’t know how it would work in any detail, but it seems that, inasmuch as beliefs refer, it must also be by enabling you to locate the referent well enough for the belief to hold. Your belief “Samantha is white” depends on the ability to check, potentially at least. Maybe you’ve actually seen the dog, knew it was Samantha, and saw her color. Or maybe someone has only told you she was white, and you wouldn’t recognize her. But then, as with Ouagadougou, you are relying on someone else’s ability to say which dog it was. And that is fine.

  • 1. For further discussion, see Chapters 11 and 12 in Philip E. Agre’s Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎ (1997).
  • 2. I am referring here to model theory↗︎︎ and its attempted application↗︎︎ to natural language semantics. Model theory is, indeed, extraordinarily elegant and beautiful; I recommend learning and appreciating it if you have the opportunity. Formal semantics as a subfield of linguistics… not.
  • 3. This is a reference to “stupid human tricks↗︎︎,” a segment of comedian David Letterman’s television show, in which amateurs would demonstrate remarkable but dubious skills such as playing tunes on disposable razors or sticking grapes up their nose with their tongue.
  • 4. In ethnomethodology, the polite term for stupid human tricks is “ethnomethods”: methods used by a people (ethnos in Greek). Those are the actual topic of ethnomethodology. You might think “ethnomethodology” would be a theory of what technical methods should be used by ethnographers, but it’s not. Ethnomethodology itself has no technical methods; it finds out what ethnomethods people use by any means available.
  • 5. This is a major theme in linguistic pragmatics and in ethnomethodology. In both fields it is termed indexicality.
  • 6. This was a central example in my PhD thesis book: Vision, Instruction, and Action↗︎︎, 1991.

Reasonable epistemology

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This chapter is a sketch of the epistemology↗︎︎ of reasonableness↗︎︎. It is only a sketch, because meta-rationalism↗︎︎ is much less concerned with epistemology than rationalism↗︎︎ is (and much more concerned with ontology↗︎︎).

The epistemological categories—inference, truth, belief, and so on—are richer, more complex, more diverse, and more nebulous↗︎︎ in reality than in rationalist theories.

The rationalist theory is that an individual’s beliefs are a set of (proposition, truth value) pairs. The virtues of this theory are that it is crisp and simple. Its defects are that it is metaphysical and wrong. Propositions are acknowledged to be non-physical, and rationalism fails to explain scientific knowledge.

A better alternative should understand believing empirically, as a complex, contingent, diverse natural phenomenon: more like biochemistry than mathematics. The defects of any such understanding are that it is nebulous and complex. Its virtue is that, with adequate empirical grounding, it can be roughly right.

The ethnomethodological flip redirects attention from hypothetical things-in-the-head to observable activities. That suggests studying occasions of believing, rather than static beliefs.

Reasonable ontology

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This chapter tackles head-on the obstacle that wrecked every attempt at rationalism↗︎︎, and explains the reasonable↗︎︎ alternative.

An ontology↗︎︎ is a tool: a way of relating to the world that enables activities we care about.

Formal rationality↗︎︎ depends on a perfectly sharp ontology, because that makes absolute truths possible. Truths, like “HIV causes AIDS,” often enable activities we care about, like disease prevention and treatment. In a formal ontology, things definitely belong to a category or don’t, properties have precise values, reality is tidily divided into objectively separable individuals, and they are in unambiguous relationships with each other. All this should hold independent of context and purposes; if something is an eggplant, it remains an eggplant wherever you take it and whatever you do with it. Rationalism assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that the world actually works this way.

At the eggplant scale, it doesn’t, due to the many manifestations of nebulosity we explored in Part One. The world as described by quantum physics is independent of context and purposes. However, that ontology is useful only in rare circumstances, for unusual purposes like nanoscale device design, so it is also contextual and purpose-laden from our point of view. There is no uniform, accurate, context-free, purpose-free, objective ontology for eggplants, baldness, or river crossing. The eggplant-sized world is indefinite in roughly the same way language is.

Reasonableness works with nebulous, tacit, interactive, accountable, purposeful ontologies and truths, which enable everyday routine activity. (And, we’ll see in Part Three, they’re also necessary to make rationality work at the eggplant scale.)

Nebulous↗︎︎ means that something can be “pretty much” an eggplant, without there being any ultimate truth of the matter. Tacit means that use of an ontology generally goes unnoticed and unexpressed. Interactive means that ontology is an aspect of activity; you treat something as an eggplant (or not) in the course of shopping or cooking. Accountable means that if you treat something iffy as an eggplant, you may be expected to give an explanation of why it counts as one. Purposeful means that ontologies are tools for getting work done, you use different ones on different occasions, and whether or not something counts as an eggplant depends on what you are doing with it.

Instructed activity

Guy assembling a bookshelf

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Kaptain Kobold

“Instructed activity” means taking instructions into account while doing stuff.

Someone is watching over your shoulder and giving advice while you play a video game; or you are driving with a GPS app giving you directions; or you are checking the instruction sheet while assembling an IKEA bookshelf; or you are building a lamp from scratch, and you figured out the main steps ahead of time, and you are now carrying out your plan—a series of instructions you made for yourself.

Making sense of the instructions, and making use of them, may involve all the sorts of work we’ve covered earlier in Part Two. So this final chapter of the Part draws together all of its themes.

This chapter also serves as a bridge into Part Three. Performing a formal procedure, such as factoring a polynomial, is also following instructions. Understanding how that is similar to following street directions, and how it is different, is central to understanding the relationship between reasonableness and rationality.

This chapter recapitulates artificial intelligence research from my PhD thesis, which I quote from below. I wrote a program, Sonja, that took instructions while playing a video game; it illustrated most of the points covered here.1

Recipes are not programs

Instructions never completely specify what to do. A recipe says “lay the slices of eggplant on paper towels and sprinkle lightly with salt”; it does not say how you pick up each slice and where to position it on the paper towel; or what to do if you drop one; or whether you scatter the salt from a shaker or from between your fingers.

This is obvious, but bears emphasizing due to a potential rationalist misunderstanding. Often programming is introduced as “giving the computer instructions,” and programs are likened to recipes. This is probably helpful for novices, but potentially misleading in that a program does have to specify what will be done in complete detail. Then the computer does exactly and only what the program says.

This understanding of program execution is then sometimes read back onto human activity. One rationalist theory of action is that you write “plans” for yourself, where “plan” means a program, and then execute them.2 For many different reasons, this can’t work; one is the impossibility of foreseeing all the details of how irregular slices of eggplant will flex or slip, and so exactly how you will have to grip them. Reality is complicated, so you often have to wait to figure out how to cross a river until you get there.

Interpreting instructions in context

“Following” instructions suggests that you just do what they say. You can’t, since they can’t say everything. Also, first you have to figure out what they mean, in terms of the specifics of what you are doing. Reasonable interpretation, relying on context and purpose, is required. As explained earlier, “interpretation” does not usually require explicit reasoning, but it does always take some work, and is sometimes difficult. To make instructions useful, you need to see how they are relevant. If we are playing a collaborative video game and I yell “use a knife!”, you need to figure out what to use it for.

Maybe the point of “use a knife!” is to hurl it at a demon toad; maybe it is to jimmy a lock. Context determines what actions are possible; and purposes—what we are jointly trying to accomplish right now—determine which are relevant. What must my instruction be trying to say, given those? Well, fiddling with the lock while under attack by demons would be dumb.

So it is more accurate to say that you take instructions into account in the course of reasonable activity than that you “follow” them. Instructions are one resource among many for making sense of what’s going on.

Looking ahead to Part Three, a key difference between reasonable instruction use and performing a rational procedure is that in rationality you must not take circumstances or purposes into account. Context-stripping is much of what gives rationality its distinctive power.

Instructed looking

To take an instruction into account, most often you have to look to see what it is talking about. You use task-specific visual routines for that.

An instruction usually includes referring expressions. “Add two eggs”: you will have to go to the refrigerator, look around inside to find the egg carton, carry it to the counter, open it, and look to see how to grasp the eggs as you pick them up and crack them open.

Often an instruction explicitly tells you what to look at, or for, or how. In a video game: “Look out! Specter on the left! In the shadow!”

Locating the bits referred to in the instructions to flat-pack furniture is notoriously difficult.3 “Attach rail (C) to front legs (D) with four bolts (J).” There’s a mess of miscellaneous bits on the floor; which are the bolts? Oh, these. No, wait, there’s long bolts and short ones… Are these type J? You page back through the instructions to the parts list, hold a bolt up next to the picture, and look back and forth between the two.

What counts as doing that?

Instructions rely on a background of meanings shared between the instruction giver and taker. A recipe has to assume that you already know how to cook, and when it says “add two eggs” it doesn’t need to explicitly direct you to remove their shells first. For instructions to be interpretable, the shared meaning must be nearly complete; instructions concern only the tiny bit the user may be missing.

This might be misunderstood, in the action-as-program-execution model, in terms of instructions functioning as high-level function calls. You would already have a procedure for adding eggs; you’d just need to know when to call it (with the argument 2). But you don’t have a procedure for adding eggs; you have to improvise it every time, because real-world circumstances are never exactly the same.

In my video corpus, there are many instances of someone being told “Turn left!” when doing so at that moment would run him into a wall. The player turns left when he gets to the upcoming junction the instruction implicitly refers to. But it is not merely a syntactic ellipsis for “Turn left at the junction coming up.” I have examples of someone deferring the instruction further, because when he gets to the junction an enemy starts shooting at him from the right, and turning left before killing the assailant would be suicidal. “Turn left” here ‘means’ “Turn left when it makes sense to do so.” The same qualification implicitly applies to every instruction. What makes sense depends on all the particulars of the situation. Relevance cannot be determined a priori; the use of “Turn left” is a matter for indefinite amounts and types of situation-specific interpretation.

“Get the amulet” does not tell Sonja what to do in the sense that a program instructs a computer. Getting the amulet can take a lot of work; Sonja may have to navigate about the dungeon and fight off monsters along the way. Sonja is autonomously competent at getting amulets and many other routine game activities; and you can no more tell it to perform the available primitive actions than you can tell me to send a particular sequence of neural impulses to my arm muscles. Instructions do not act like calls on high-level subroutines, either; getting the amulet may have to be interleaved with almost every other activity Sonja is capable of.4

An instruction is an prospective account of activity. What counts as taking it into account?

“Adjust seat tension with provided hex key (N).” What is “seat tension”? Adjust it how? I mean, presumably I’m going to turn a hex nut, but how do I know when the seat is adjusted? Is it supposed to just feel right, or what?

An instruction may suggest what to do, or what the outcome should be—and then it’s up to you to figure out how to accomplish that. “Ensure lip (S) fits below bracket (Q).” Well, it doesn’t, it’s stuck on the bracket, and I can’t see how to slide it down any further. Do I whack it harder? Or undo the last three assembly steps and try again, keeping an eye on the bracket and making sure it behaves? Oh, or maybe it’s already “below” the bracket in the relevant sense, given that the whole thing is upside-down at this point?

The point here is not that instructions are bad (although they often are) nor that people are bad at following instructions (although we often are). It’s that, no matter how good they and we are, it still takes work to figure out what they mean for what we’re doing, and unenumerable considerations may be relevant to that interpretive process.

What’s distinctive about formal rationality is that none of this is necessary. Considerations are not unenumerable, and contextual interpretation is neither required nor allowed. That makes the job radically simpler—in some ways.

Trouble, negotiation, and repair of instructions

As with routine activity generally, instruction interpretation is normally so easy and trouble-free that we overlook its necessity. That’s why I gave the furniture assembly examples, because instruction use there is notoriously difficult. Often you can’t figure out what they are talking about, and have to just plunge ahead and hope for the best; or you think you are following them, but later realize you were doing the wrong thing.

If instructions are given live during the course of the activity, either the instruction giver or taker may recognize trouble, and initiate repair. My program Sonja, when told “Use a knife,” could complain “I haven’t GOT a knife!” In a real-world example, Helen and Claire were watching television, and the oven timer went off:

Helen: Right, could you switch that off for me.
Claire: Where is it?
Helen: No, the television. I’ll sort the oven out.5

Helen realized Claire misunderstood “it” to refer to the oven, because she couldn’t possibly not know where the television was.

When instructions don’t seem reasonable, you may have to negotiate their meaning, just as with any accounts:

E: First you have to remove the flywheel.
A: How?
E: First, loosen the two allen head setscrews holding it to the shaft, then pull it off.
A: OK. I can only find one screw. Where’s the other one?
E: On the hub of the flywheel.
A: That’s the one I found. Where’s the other one?
E: About ninety degrees around the hub from the first one.
A: I don’t understand. I can only find one. Oh wait, yes I think I was on the wrong wheel.6

A distinctive feature of formal rationality, by contrast, is its non-negotiability.

Part Three: Taking rationality seriously

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

A temporary overview

As of mid-2020, Part Three, which explains how rationality↗︎︎ works, is unfinished. This temporary web page is an extensive summary of its contents.

This summary is about 6000 words, equivalent to 15–20 printed pages. I expect the full, finished Part will be a bit over a hundred pages—to give you a sense of how much more detail it will provide. I hope this summary is detailed enough to give a useful overall understanding.

This summary also frequently foreshadows the contents of the unpublished Part Four. That explains how meta-rationality↗︎︎ can improve our use of rationality by reflecting on the explanations in Part Three.

Taking rationality seriously

“Taking rationality seriously” means caring enough about it to want to improve its operation. That requires an empirically accurate and practical understanding of how and when and why rationality works.

We saw in Part One that most theories of rationality↗︎︎ (rationalisms↗︎︎) involve impossible metaphysical fantasies, and encounter frequent difficulties in practice. A better explanation should address all those problems, explaining how rationality (as a real-world practice) successfully handles each issue.

This Part of The Eggplant presents an such alternative understanding of rationality, using a meta-rationalist↗︎︎ approach. That is: observing the operation of rationality from outside and above, rather than trying to make sense of it from inside.

Part Three is the middle of the book. As such, it ties both back and forward, to all the other Parts.

Looking back, it explains how its alternative understanding of rationality deals with each of the difficulties rationalism faced, as explained in Part One. It also shows how each of the resources provided by reasonableness↗︎︎, explained in Part Two, contribute to rationality’s functioning.

Looking forward, Part Three provides a necessary “anatomy” or “engineering diagram” of rationality. It explains what rationality’s major moving parts are, and how they relate. Some pieces critical to its operation are entirely overlooked by rationalist↗︎︎ theories. An accurate explanation is a prerequisite to understanding meta-rationality↗︎︎, because that acts on rationality to modify its operation. The “floor plan” of rationality shows sites where meta-rationality can intervene. For example, the interface between rationality and reasonableness is one of the most important sites for intervention, and rationalist theories don’t even recognize its existence.

Part Three foreshadows themes of Parts Four and Five. Those are the heart of The Eggplant, because meta-rationality is its overall topic.

  • Part Three points out difficulties in the use of rationality that rationalism cannot address, but which are resolved meta-rationally in Part Four.
  • Part Three also concerns rationality as a professional practice. That is the topic for Part Five. Part Five takes an explicitly meta-rational approach, whereas that is only hinted at here.

Although the primary function of Part Three is preliminary, it may also be interesting in is own right, for understanding your personal practice of rationality. As technical professionals, we are fascinated with the tools we rely on: GC/MS instruments, 3D printers, bytecode compilers. Rationality is our most important tool, and you may be excited to gain a new understanding of how it works.

What an understanding of rationality should do

An understanding of rationality should explain—to the extent possible—how, when, and why rationality works.

  • It should account for observed facts about how rationality works in practice.
  • More important: it should be useful. An abstract descriptive theory might be academically interesting, but rationality is too valuable to leave it at that. A better understanding than rationalism↗︎︎ ought to enable us do rationality better.
  • As a secondary, aesthetic consideration, it should also eschew metaphysics, and prefer naturalistic explanations, where possible.

The standard rationalist story of how rationality guides practical work goes like this:

  • You make a formal model of the problem (abstraction)
  • You use rational inference within the formal model to solve the problem (problem-solving)
  • You apply the formal solution to the real-world problem (application).

This is not exactly wrong, but it leaves open key questions:

  • Specifically how do you get a formal model, starting from a real-world situation?
  • What sort of thing is a formal model?
  • How does the abstract formal model relate to the concrete situation? In two senses: how can abstract and concrete things relate at all; and how does this particular abstraction relate to that particular situation?
  • If the formal model is an abstraction, how do you relate to it, given that you are physical and it apparently isn’t?
  • What does problem-solving consist of? How do you do it?
  • Given a formal solution, how do you make use of it in the real world?

The overall issue here is: How do abstractions, which seem to be metaphysical, relate to physical reality? Rationalism has no answer (as we saw in Part One).

STEM education, at least before the PhD level, is almost entirely about problem solving within a rational system. You are given an abstract, formal model, supposedly of some real-world phenomenon, which you are supposed to take for granted. You are given a formal problem statement within the abstraction, and you manipulate it according to formal rules, in order to produce a formal solution, which is an abstraction that matches the specification. Then you are done.

Most contemporary rationalists are passionately committed to materialism, which makes questions about “how does all this abstract stuff relate to reality” especially awkward. So STEM education tacitly teaches you not to ask these questions, by declaring them philosophical nonsense with no meaningful implications for technical work. The implication is that, in practice, such issues are trivial for scientists and engineers, even if they might cause trouble for philosophers.

Part Three suggests that each of the “philosophical” questions, raised above, represents a concrete, practical task within rational practice. Reflecting on how you do them (which constitutes meta-rationality) can improve that practice. Passing over these considerations can produce predictable patterns of rationalist failure.

The J-curve of development

Understanding how individuals develop into rationality, and then into meta-rationality, helps understand what rationality and meta-rationality are. Although personal development is a continuous process, it can be helpful to think of it as divided into stages:

  • Pre-rationality: you can be reasonable↗︎︎, but have little or no capacity for formal reasoning.
  • Developing formality: you learn how to conform to formal, rather than reasonable, norms. Mastering the high school mathematics curriculum is adequate.
  • Basic rationality: you learn how to model the material world using formal systems with routine, conventional patterns of correspondence. Undergraduate STEM education teaches this.
  • Advanced rationality: you figure out how to deploy rationality in cases where standard conventional patterns don’t apply. This is the functional prerequisite for competence in senior science, technology, and engineering jobs. (And in other rationality-based occupations, such as business, public administration, and law.) Graduate school may transmit it, usually mainly informally. It shades into meta-rationality.
  • Meta-rationality: Dynamic revision of rational, circumrational, and meta-rational processes through meta-rational understanding. This is not taught. Rarely, it is transmitted through apprenticeship, in the course of a PhD, or on the job. Mostly you have to figure it out for yourself, though reflection on experience of practice.

Part Three covers the three middle stages of the list, in order: formality, basic rationality, advanced rationality. This sequence is compatible with a developmental model I’ve presented elsewhere↗︎︎. Part Three elaborates and subdivides the path into, through, and beyond the “systematic” stage of that schema.

J-curve

Dude: units?? Also: if you can’t draw, use a program

I describe development from reasonableness through rationality to meta-rationality as a “J-curve,” with time on the horizontal axis and the role of meaningfulness—context, purpose, and nebulous specifics—on the vertical.

We saw in Part Two that context, purpose, and nebulosity are essential to reasonableness. (That is the leftmost part of the J.)

Eliminating meaning is essential to formality. Rationality gains its power from transcending context, purpose, and specifics, to create universal, abstract, general systems. The first step in developing rationality is accepting this unnatural, emotionally difficult operation. You have to become comfortable with meaninglessness.

“But I don’t get it,” the student struggling with high school algebra protests. “What does ‘x’ mean?” It doesn’t mean anything. That is the whole point. That meaninglessness is why formalism works. You cannot get this by learning facts, nor procedures, though both are necessary.

To become rational, you need to become a fundamentally different sort of process yourself—a sort that seems rigid, cold, and alien until you have made the transition. A sort that can wield the power of meaninglessness.

The J bottoms out as you learn to strip context and purpose off the real world, treating it as collections of abstractions. You learn to deal with struts, enzymes, populations, and economies on the same basis as polynomials. This is basic rationality.

As you develop through advanced rationality and into meta-rationality, context and purpose come back into play. The right end of the J is taller than the left, because meta-rationality takes an enormously broader view than mere reasonableness. It considers contexts and purposes with potentially vast scope across space, time, and complexity—whereas reasonableness is sensitive only to the mundane aspects of the immediate situation necessary to get a particular job done now.

This second developmental transition is also emotionally difficult. The vastness and groundlessness of the meta-rational way of being provoke agoraphobia and vertigo. Again, to get meta-rationality, it is insufficient to learn new concepts and methods. You must become a qualitatively different sort of space yourself—one that seems unacceptably unbounded, indefinite, and alien until you have made the transition.

Formalism

Rationalism’s theory of problem solving is that you manipulate abstract objects according to formal rules. Undergraduate STEM education mostly teaches you those rules. But how can you, a physical object, manipulate metaphysical, abstract objects?

The implicit story is that you sit back, close your eyes, enter the rationality trance, and mentally step through the Pythagorean Portal into the Metaphysical Realm of Pure Forms. In your astral body, you quest amongst the quaternions; your etheric eyes↗︎︎ survey the serried rows of the regression matrix; with your ghostly hands you invert cyclic subgroups like phantom bicycle wheels.

In the chapter on advanced rationality, we’ll see that this is not entirely wrong—although obviously uncomfortable from a physicalist standpoint. However, it’s empirically false as a theory of formal problem solving in basic rationality.

Fortunately, a naturalistic alternative is available, and it also helps explains how and when and why rationality works.

Humans evolved for reasonableness, not formal rationality. Unaided, we are almost entirely incapable of it. We need artificial cognitive support:

The physicist Richard Feynman once got into an argument with the historian Charles Weiner. Feynman understood the extended mind; he knew that writing his equations and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought. But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.” No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his thinking process. They were his thinking process:

“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.

“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”1

We do not, in physical reality, manipulate formal objects. We interact with squiggles on paper, a whiteboard, or a screen. Taking seriously the observable details of what we do there helps unravel the mysteries of formalism’s role in rationality, and how and when and why rationality works.

There’s two tricks to formality: concrete proceduralization and decontextualization. These are accomplished using external, culturally produced, mostly-recent technologies that allow us to repurpose brains evolved for mere reasonableness to do rationality. (My analysis here draws heavily on Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ Formal Languages in Logic.)

Concrete proceduralization: factoring a polynomial on paper involves visual routines, seeing-as, hand-eye coordination, trouble repair, and—in sum—much the same interactional dynamics as any other routine, concrete activity. That’s pretty much all we’re capable of! We rely on the material aid (paper and ink) as a cognitive prosthesis. Writing and reading what we have written more-or-less accomplishes abstract formal inference. This is an astonishing triumph of embodied, cultural practices of notation. The material outputs of this externally-observable rationality causally affect physical situations, via our subsequent activities that take into account what we have written.

Decontextualization enforces a rational closed-world idealization. We evolved to maintain open awareness of unenumerable potentially relevant factors. Surrounded by a buzzing cloud of distracting possibilities, we are incapable of focusing for rational inference—without external prostheses that shield us from the noise. Rationality gains its power from transcending context, purpose, specifics, to create universal, abstract, general systems. The meaninglessness of x is the key to that power. Nothing is relevant to it.

Getting better at solving problems by understanding abstractions better is a major aspect of advanced rationality—not meta-rationality. Meta-rationality is mainly concerned with the context within which rationality operates. But, that includes the material context within which we do formal work. Improvements in notation, to make the concrete visual work of formula manipulation easier, are a meta-rational topic, for example.

What makes rationality work?

We do.

The wording of the question might sound odd. “Why does rationality work?” might sound more natural. That’s rationalism’s central question—with the hope that there’s some elegant, abstract, universal answer that explains why it always does and must work. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. Rationality works only when we do work to make it work. We do unenumerably many different sorts of work, and they don’t always work; so no elegant, abstract, universal explanation is possible. Still, there’s much to say about sorts of work we do. This chapter covers several.

Circumrationality

Part One explained why formal rationality cannot make contact with nebulous↗︎︎ reality. A rational system refers to objects, categories, properties, and relationships that it cannot define, and cannot explain how to identify as concrete phenomena. Disconnection from reality is how rationality gains its power: it is our knowing to leave nebulosity out of a formal problem—where it would wreck rational inference—that lets us solve it.

However, that means we have to act as the dynamic interface that bridges a formalism/reality gap. Circumrationality is this non-rational work we do at the margins of a rational system. Actualizing a correspondence between rationally specified entities and the messy real world requires perception and interpretation, action and improvisation, communication and negotiation. How do we find the entities a rational plan refers to? How do we describe the mess we find in the terms the system restricts itself to? How do we “take” the actions it mandates?

(Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out is an entire book devoted to what I call circumrationality, with many detailed and fascinating examples, some of which I’ll probably reuse.)

What counts as a missing band in an electrophoresis gel? What counts as a vacuum seal? Such considerations may be quantified, standardized, rationalized; but not every detail ever can be. Where the rational system falls silent, reasonable perception and judgement is required. That involves the kinds of dynamics of interaction explained in Part Two.

Circumrationality treats vagueness, uncertainty, and nebulosity as specific practical difficulties to be addressed with unenumerable specific methods, suitable in specific situations.

Routine reasonable repair is required when rationality glitches. When that succeeds, it goes unnoticed, and rationality takes the credit.

Circumrationality may work more or less well. A major meta-rational task is revising the rationality/circumrationality relationship when it isn’t working well, or if you notice opportunities for improvement. If the participants in a rational system frequently find it difficult to classify objects according to its ontology, or cannot figure out how to take the actions it requires because they don’t seem meaningful in context, it’s time to get meta-rational. Maybe circumrationality needs upgrading: better tools or skills might enable more accurate classification, for example. Maybe the rational system requires rethinking. Is the ontology adequate for its purposes? Most often, rationality and circumrationality should both be reworked to work better together.

Procedural systems

Procedural systems eliminate the need for novel problem solving, which is inherently slow and unreliable. They mandate rules for action that cover all likely eventualities within their domain. The norms of a procedural system are similar to those of a formal system, but operate in the material world. Like Newton’s root-finding method, you can “execute” a laboratory protocol “by the book,” and it’s more-or-less unambiguous whether or not you have done so.

Meta-rationality reflects on a procedural system’s adequacy. What would happen if unknown unknowns trip it up, for instance?

Sanity-checking

Sanity-checking formal inference rejects nonsense results from feeding sort-of truths into rational inference. Sort-of truths are usually the only ones available, but the correctness of rational inference depends on absolute truth. We have to accept that rationality often comes to wrong conclusions, for instance when a closed-world idealization fails. When your statistical analysis determines with high confidence that the moon is made of green cheese, you should not rush to publish your exciting discovery.

Meta-rationality reasons about how specific systems of formal reasoning behave in the face of nebulosity.

Standardization

Rationalism highlights methods of adjusting a theory to better fit reality—which is indeed important. However, in practice, much more rational work adjusts reality to fit a rational system. This is true even when the ultimate aim is theory improvement. Using esoteric equipment and methods to get some tiny bit of reality to behave according to theory is most of what you do in a science lab.

Standardization is work that reworks the physical world to make it more nearly fit a rational ontology. Without technological aids, rationality gains little purchase on the natural world at the eggplant scale. You can’t build much of anything out of stuff you find in the wilderness, because the matter has no definite properties. Engineering requires starting materials and components that conform to rational criteria, which enables rational inference. We’ve bootstrapped technological civilization by building ever-more-definite machines that can produce ever-more-definite inputs for building even-more-definite machine-making machines.

Designing standards involves meta-rational reasoning about the consequences of nebulous slop in systems’ inputs. Not just “how much can this system tolerate”—which might be addressed rationally—but “what new design possibilities could new standards enable?”

Shielding

Shielding isolates a situation from factors a rational framework ignores, so its closed-world idealization more nearly holds. We might also describe it as “relevance control”: shielding makes as many of the unenumerable potentially relevant factors as irrelevant as possible.

Shielding can be literal: enclosing a situation in a causally-inert solid material. It can be accomplished many other ways:

Although none of the [scanning tunneling microscopy] lab members would require daily cleaning of the laboratory as an indispensable condition for experimental physics to proceed, a cleaning woman would make her daily rounds, wiping the floor and emptying the garbage bins. Every day at around 4.30 pm, she would wipe the corridor first and then enter the experimental areas of the lab, both upstairs and downstairs. To avoid her touching the cryostats with the floor mop, the lab chief had suggested setting up chains around them. One day, peering down at her wiping the basement floor, he noticed her passing the mop below the chain, thus touching the cryostat, lightly but repeatedly (with each cryostat contact risking a tip crash). To prevent that unexpected “Limbo” move, lab members would set up additional warning signs, some of which were in Spanish, the mother tongue of the cleaning woman (since she had an all-access key, simply locking the doors wouldn’t suffice).2

Shielding limits the need for inference, through context engineering. Unrestricted rational inference doesn’t work, because the premises are not absolutely true, but with adequate shielding you can get a few carefully-chosen steps to work reliably-enough.

The closely-related engineering principle of modularity, or “nearly-decomposable systems,” minimizes the mutual relevance of parts of a complex system, making design and analysis easier.

Meta-rationality can help figure out what sorts of shielding a system needs.

Yes, but why does rationality work?

For different reasons in different cases. We do lots of different things to make rationality work; in each case it’s pretty obvious why it works, but there’s no general explanation.

“But why is it possible at all?”

Well, if you insist on abstract metaphysics, because the world is patterned↗︎︎ as well as nebulous. We can’t force reality to conform to some arbitrary system of rationality. Often rationality doesn’t work.

When rationality works, it’s because we’ve found ways of cooperating with patterning to make rationality work well enough in some situations.That’s often a meta-rational activity.

Case studies

Part Three will include many brief examples, and at least two detailed case studies.

Experimental physics

Most of the work is bullying balky equipment into behaving itself.

Phillipe Sormani’s Respecifying Lab Ethnography↗︎︎ describes events in the construction and use of a superconducting scanning tunnelling microscope that illustrate most of the points I make in Part Three. The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory. STM operation involves unexpected birds’ nests in the cabling, mosquitos in the sample chamber, and mops banging the cryostat. Examples of circumrationality, standardization, procedural systems, sanity-checking, and shielding all appear in Sormani’s book.

Park Doing’s Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron↗︎︎ is a first-hand account of the operation of the X-ray source of a football-field-sized particle accelerator. He was responsible for the machine’s maintenance, and vividly describes the messy realities of making this extreme technology work.

Photocopier repair

Julian E. Orr’s Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job↗︎︎ is a detailed ethnomethodological↗︎︎ study of circumrationality in professional technical work.

The book describes the work of Xerox copier repair technicians. The rational systems they make work are (1) the operation of high-tech, rationally-engineered office equipment, and (2) the formal relationships between Xerox, customer companies that run the copiers, and the technicians themselves.

The engineers designing the copiers had little knowledge of how they were used in practice. Their products worked great in the lab. In the real world, they broke down every few days or at most weeks, and a Xerox technician had to drive to the customer site to repair them. The design engineers did not take into account relevant, uncontrollable context: customers ran them too much or too little, too sporadically, loaded supplies upside down, put in the wrong kind of toner to save money, pushed the wrong button, forgot to remove staples, housed the copiers in unventilated rooms where they overheated, squirted oil in random holes in hope of fixing the machine when it broke down, …

Xerox supplied the repair technicians with manuals with detailed instructions for how to diagnose and repair failures. These manuals were written rationally, from first principles, on the basis of what engineers thought might go wrong, rather than what did go wrong in practice. Often they were unusable, due to not covering common failure modes, giving instructions that made no sense or that were physically impossible to carry out, suggesting a fix that would work but was more complicated or expensive than the practical one; or being outright false.

Circumrationality bridges the unavoidable gap between a tidy rational system and the nebulosity↗︎︎ of reality. A copier malfunction report is highly nebulous. Is it actually not working, or is the customer confused? Is it not working because it is broken or because its environment is hostile? If it is broken, what is wrong with it? This is initially uncertain and may never be definable. Copiers are enormously complex, and even individual design engineers do not understand every aspect of one. Taking bits apart, cleaning them, and putting them back together may solve the problem without your ever knowing what actually caused it.

Repairing a copier is usually improvisational; the rational plan in the manual won’t work. It’s done by finger-feel and by ear and by eye, as well as by constructing a plausible causal narrative from practical experience and reflection on a pattern of symptoms.

Orr’s investigation led to a major meta-rational remodeling, which I’ll use as a case study in Part Four. Xerox eventually accepted that technicians’ experience, understanding, and improvisational fixes were critical. Its computer science laboratory PARC built a wiki-like system↗︎︎ that let technicians exchange this knowledge globally. The system produced $15 million per year in savings for the company, as problems were diagnosed faster (decreasing labor costs), more accurately (so fewer expensive replacement parts required), and more reliably (so the machines broke down less often, making customers happier).

Advanced rationality

This chapter will cover types of work that remain within a rational system, but which go beyond the “basic” rationality that can be taught explicitly, and that is theorized by rationalisms. I’ll call this “advanced rationality.” You get a glimpse of advanced rationality as an undergraduate. Mostly you learn it at the graduate level, or through mentorship in employment, although it’s mainly transmitted only implicitly.

Advanced rationality shades into meta-rationality, which is why it’s important to cover it in this Part: we’re setting up for the explanation of meta-rationality in Part Four.

Advanced rationality relaxes formalism’s narrowing and shielding of inference. Proceduralization and context-stripping make basic rationality work, but also make it weak and brittle.

Non-procedural rationality

Not all formal problems have procedural solution methods. Sometimes no method is known; sometimes it’s provable there are none; sometimes the available methods are impractical.

You may first encounter this difficulty in a differential equations course. It does not give you a reliable solution method; it teaches many methods, one of which might work. It is not always obvious which, and it is not always obvious how to apply one. Sometimes you have to apply several methods to a single problem, in the right order and in the right ways. How do you figure that out? The textbook doesn’t say. Somewhere in the fine print, it admits that sometimes no method works. This is not yet an encounter with nebulosity, but it may induce a similar feeling of groundlessness.

Beyond differential equations, “prove this theorem,” “devise an experiment to answer this question,” and “design a device that accomplishes this mechanical task” are unboundedly open-ended—while still staying mainly within the realm of the merely rational.

There is no “how” to solving such problems. There are many “hows,” many methods, which might somehow be made relevant, and might work—but any one trick may probably do only part of the work, if it works at all. A solution may involve fitting several together in a novel arrangement. In particularly difficult cases, it may require inventing an altogether new method.

In advanced rationality, a solution may be only a solution, one among many possible—whereas in basic rationality usually there is only the solution. Is the solution you found a good one? Good enough? How do you judge that? Is it worth looking for a better one? Or there may be no solution; and there may be no way of knowing that for sure. How do you decide when to give up?

These are questions of purpose, which, like other context, rationality strips off problem statements. Advanced rationality may address them successfully in an optimization framework. Often they are better treated meta-rationally.

Envisioning

When the topics I describe as “advanced rationality” are discussed, it’s usually in terms of “intuition” or “creativity.” Those translate to “don’t ask how to do this.”

An activity I’ll call envisioning, for lack of a standard term, often comes up when someone is willing to answer. Envisioning is related to, but significantly distinct from, mental visual imagery. It is difficult to describe, and may sound dubious when I explain it.

There seems to be a peculiar taboo involved. I have informally asked many people how they solve advanced rational problems, and explicit reluctance is common. It’s embarrassing, even for people with acknowledged professional expertise in rationality. I’ve heard that it’s too personal, like talking specifically about your experience of sex. Many feel vulnerable because they suspect they are bad at it, or doing it wrong, because they had to figure it out entirely privately—since there is a taboo against talking about it! “Probably real mathematicians know how to do it right; I’m just faking it.” Even Richard Feynman felt he had to apologize awkwardly for doing it badly; he called it “a half-assedly thought-out pictorial semi-vision thing.”

I would perpetuate the taboo, perhaps, except that envisioning becomes even more important in meta-rationality. Explaining it first as an aspect of advanced rationality may prevent the impression that it’s pure woo.

Let’s give it some initial credibility by quoting Albert Einstein:

“The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.3

Accounts typically emphasize that envisioning is somewhat like deliberately imagined visual images, but different in respects that are consistent across reports. One is that envisioning also resembles kinesthetic experience—what Einstein describes as a “muscular” or “motor” quality. Another is that it lacks aspects of visual experience: envisioning is typically described as vague, and the forms are “ghostly,” colorless, and transparent. Instead, this “semi-vision thing” seems more a direct apperception of shapes hanging in space, and particularly the dynamic relationships among them. Further, one can act upon them oneself—play with them, as Einstein says—and observe the consequences. Envisioning is productive when the analogy between this imagined activity and a formal problem leads to a formal solution, when translated into words or formal notation.

(This is the sense in which the rationalist fantasy of entering the Platonic realm is “not entirely wrong.” It probably has much more to do with the internalization of visuo-motor routines than metaphysics, however.)

Whereas, in advanced rationality, envisioning enables you to “feel for” a solution, meta-rationality uses envisioning to feel for a problem. Problem-finding is a major meta-rational operation. In other meta-rational activity, we feel for new ontologies and envision assemblages of systems. Before intervening meta-rationally in a rational system, we envision the consequences.

Ascending the J-curve

It is possible to ignore context, purpose, and nebulosity throughout a career as a technical professional. There’s nothing wrong with that; competent problem-solvers are valuable, and brilliant ones more so. However, your usefulness in that case depends on other people doing the work of abstracting formal problems from reality, and figuring out how to turn your formal solutions into practical work products.

Typically, moving into more senior positions brings you closer to the volatile, ambiguous, unknowable complexities of reality. Increasingly, it is your job to make decisions about purposes and priorities; to turn nebulous messes into crisp problems you delegate to junior staff who can do basic, cut-and-paste rationality; to translate “solutions” into practical activities.

Advanced rationality, then, recognizes that solving difficult problems requires multiple models, exploiting ad hoc domain constraints, inference-limiting, and solution-monitoring. Understanding when and why formal procedures work becomes ever-more important.

Practitioners of advanced rationality are likely to say:

  • Maybe there’s another way of looking at this
  • All models are wrong, but some are useful
  • It’s publishable, and probably even true
  • That’s a beautiful textbook theory, and it won’t work here
  • Good, fast, cheap: pick two
  • It does what the client needs, so we’re ignoring the general case
  • The design was correct last year. It’s incorrect today. Start over
  • You should know how to prove theorems, and you should be skeptical that theorems prove anything

These slogans shade into meta-rationality; but they may still be working primarily within a rational system.

Advanced rationality vs. meta-rationality

The boundary is nebulous, but it is also worth making the distinction.

Advanced rationality works mainly within a rational system, which it takes mainly for granted. You do not question the ontology the system assumes. Which methods to apply, and how, is up for grabs, but you do not consider using ones from an entirely different system. You do not consider switching overall to a different system, nor bringing several diverse ones to bear. It does not occur to you to apply ethnomethodology to an office equipment reliability problem, or evolutionary biology to a mechanical engineering problem.

How to not be an oblivious geek

Physicist being an oblivious geek

Courtesy↗︎︎ xkcd

Julia Galef↗︎︎: Hm, can you give me a real-world example?
Mathematician: Sure! OK, so imagine you have an infinite number of boxes with ducks in them…

Being an “oblivious geek” means doing rationality badly because you fail to recognize its limits.

You may be oblivious to context. You take a closed-world idealization for granted, and deliberately blind yourself to evidence that it isn’t working well. You do not notice when, in a particular situation, it excludes critical relevant factors that render it dysfunctional. The ontology of the rational system you inhabit may fail to make relevant distinctions that success would depend on.

You may fail to reflect on purposes. Mere rationality generally takes those as immutable givens. Someone else supplies you with problems; it’s your job to solve them. You do not ask why. Are they good problems to solve? If you are oblivious to that meta-rational question, you may come to regret having used your technical abilities to make the world worse.

Another way of defining “oblivious geeking”: it is the failure to make meta-rational choices explicitly. All rational work involves meta-rational options: how will you characterize the real-world problem situation? What sorts of technical methods will you apply? Specifically how will you apply them?

Mostly we make these choices mindlessly, implicitly applying defaults from our community of practice. Mostly, professionals want to stick to their professional competence and solve well-defined problems within that domain using standard methods. This is inadequate and sometimes leads to sometimes-catastrophic failures.

If you are a macroeconomist, you take “aggregate demand” for granted as a fundamental ontological category, even though you may vaguely remember it’s “theoretically problematic.” You take for granted that, whatever you are working on, you will apply differential equations, because that’s the main formal system your field uses. Macroeconomics has little if any predictive value; what justifies its practice? Oblivious geekery allows you to ignore the question.

This chapter will suggest ways to notice that you are being an oblivious geek, and remedies.

Overall, the antidote is: meta-rationality. That is, reflection on how you are doing rationality. So this last chapter of Part Three is the bridge into Part Four, which is about that.

The parable of the pebbles

Decomposed granite in a bucket

Decomposed granite, courtesy↗︎︎ bptakoma
How would you count the pebbles in this bucket?

Let’s look at one of the simplest rational methods, namely counting, to get clear how that works first. Later sections will extend this understanding to more complex cases.

An ancient shepherd, in an era before numbers were invented, is sick of his job. In the morning, he lets his sheep out of the pen to graze, and they scatter across a rugged pasturage. In the evening, he wants to be certain they have all returned to the fold, where they are guarded by sheepdogs against wolves. That takes a long walk, searching the hills and valleys in case a straggler has gotten stuck in a rocky crevice.

He discovers a way to divine whether some sheep are still out grazing, without searching. In the morning, as each sheep leaves one-by-one, he drops a pebble into a bucket by the gate. In the evening, as each returning sheep enters, he takes a pebble out of the bucket. When there are no pebbles left in the bucket, he can close the gate and turn in for the night.1

Why does this method of counting, using external physical counters, work? The usual rationalist story is that the number of pebbles in the bucket represents the number of sheep out to pasture. This representation is a correspondence, a “mirror of nature↗︎︎.”

This theory is true, as far as it goes. In fact, we can prove the shepherd’s method is correct, as an eternal fact about the deep structure of reality. Let us proceed by mathematical induction. At time t = 0, first thing in the morning, the bucket is empty and the gate is closed, so the number of sheep out to pasture s0 = 0, and the number of pebbles p0 = 0, and 0 = 0 so s0 = p0. At any time t when a sheep goes out of the gate, the number of sheep out increases by one, st = st − 1 + 1, and so does the number of pebbles, pt = pt − 1 + 1. By the inductive hypothesis, we have st − 1 = pt − 1. Substituting equals for equals, st = st − 1 + 1 = pt − 1 + 1 = pt. The case of a sheep coming in through the gate can be handled symmetrically, with a unit decrement rather than increment. So for all times t, pt = 0 ⟹ st = 0. QED.2

But… what about a bucket of pebbles makes them represent a field of sheep? Suppose someone from the next town happens to walk by—on her way to the fair—with a bucket of 37 pebbles. Suppose there happen to be 37 sheep in the pasture; does her bucket represent that? Presumably not. But suppose her 37 pebbles are physically identical to the shepherd’s. What non-physical property do his pebbles have that makes them representational, although hers aren’t?

Most rationalisms run into serious trouble here. They suppose that beliefs are some sort of thing in your head. What makes that sort of thing representational? What property of a collection of neurons makes them represent “Ludwig has fed the dog” or “all ravens are black”?

In the 1980s, this conundrum, “the problem of intentionality,” became the central issue in the philosophy of mind. Cognitivism collapsed when it became clear that no answer is possible—not because we don’t know enough details about how brains work, but even in principle.

It’s not that the shepherd’s bucket or pebbles are different from the fair-goer’s. It’s that he’s doing ongoing work to make them correspond with sheep, and she isn’t. Representation is not a property of the bucket, pebbles, or sheep. It’s a property of the whole history of interaction of the bucket, pebbles, shepherd, sheep, and gate. Likewise, beliefs aren’t in your head; they too are dynamics of interaction. Representation can’t be found in a snapshot of the state of the world, nor in a timeline of brain activity. It’s necessarily a process extended in both time and space.3

Rationality works because we make it work—not because it is eternally, absolutely, ultimately Correct.4 The meta-rationalist agenda asks: what kinds of work, specifically, do we do to make rationality work? How can we do that work better?

In the parable so far, the task appears perfectly mechanical and mindless. The shepherd simply puts one pebble in the bucket when a sheep goes out, and removes one when a sheep comes in. A rationalist account can accommodate error: it’s understood that if the shepherd somehow adds two pebbles by mistake, or forgets to remove one, the count will come out wrong. These are deviations from rationality. If rationalism is taken as a normative (not descriptive) theory, there is no problem here. Either the shepherd executes rationality, or not.

The method is rational because it’s mindless. A turnstile mechanism that drops a pebble in the bucket when a sheep passes could be more reliably rational than the shepherd, who is probably daydreaming about smooching with the fair-goer instead of doing his job.

However, the correctness proof depends on an ontology according to which pebbles, sheep, and containment are perfectly definite. There must be an absolute truth about how many pebbles are in the bucket. Buckets are about the same size as eggplants, and as we have seen, there are few absolute truths to be found at that scale.

What is a pebble? It’s a chunk of rock, not too big or small. How small is too small? There is no absolute truth about that. How many things are in the bucket? One person might say “six pebbles”; another might say “there’s one small stone plus five pebbles”; another “four pebbles, a couple little flakes, and some sand—I’m not going to count the grains! Bits of dust too, I suppose.” Who is right?

To make the method work, you must choose bits-of-rock of roughly even sizes, so you can distinguish them from littler bits—stray grains of sand or dust in the bucket—that don’t count. How even? Even enough that you can make a reliable-enough judgement. How even is that? This requires a judgement about your own ability to make the first judgement reliably enough.

Also, the pebbles you find in a sheep field are not definite objects. They are atoms that are more-or-less stuck together. How stuck-together is enough? Most pebbles where I live are decomposed granodiorite↗︎︎, which is highly friable. Often you can crush them between your fingers. If you drop one in a bucket, it may well break apart, and then there are two pebbles. Or maybe that’s one pebble plus a flake that doesn’t count, and some sand and dust? To prevent such confusion, you must choose pebbles that are unlikely to fracture.5 How can you tell? Perceptual skill born of experience playing with pebbles.

“How many pebbles are in the bucket?” isn’t a theoretical problem, because it doesn’t and can’t have a theoretical answer. It is a practical problem. Pebbles and sheep mostly behave like definite objects.6 You can’t count clouds or jam, because they mostly don’t. Counting depends on things reliably-enough remaining distinct-enough, or on your having a good-enough practical method for imposing individuation. There is no absolute truth about distinctness, so there’s no absolute truth about numbers of physical objects.

So the rational counting procedure cannot simply be executed mindlessly. It requires circumrational support. That is composed of merely-reasonable ongoing activities that make a rational ontology accurate enough that rational conclusions work well enough. (In this case, that is the ontology of discrete, countable objects.) Circumrationality generally involves non-rational tasks of perception, interpretation, improvisation, and negotiation. (“Using a rational framework↗︎︎,” below, explains this in more detail.)

Counting works only because we make it work.

Couldn’t we select pebbles rationally, by specifying technical criteria of size and cohesiveness, and testing those with objective measurements? Yes, but that wasn’t part of the shepherd’s method, which we supposedly proved correct. It’s a much bigger job, and one not feasible for someone who hasn’t even got numbers yet.

Systematization replaces merely-reasonable judgements with objective, rational criteria. It’s one kind of work we can do to make rationality work better. Whether or not it is a good move depends on purposes, circumstances, and resources. Systematization usually requires a large up-front investment, which may result in greater reliability and/or efficiency later.

The modern world was built on systematization and depends on its often working well. However, systematization is not always feasible, and can never be complete. It can expand the territory of rational operation, but a rational system always has margins where it interfaces with nebulous↗︎︎ reality, so it always requires circumrational support to manage those margins. Failure to recognize this results in characteristic patterns of breakdown—discussed at the end of this Part—which can only be addressed meta-rationally.

  • 1. Versions of this parable are often used in discussions of counting in the philosophy of mathematics. I don’t know where it originated. The earliest I know of is John F. Lucas’ 1986 Introduction to Abstract Mathematics↗︎︎, p. 119. My thanks to Lucy Keer for pointing it out to me. Stephen Kleene’s 1952 Introduction to Metamathematics↗︎︎ tells a similar tale, of tethering sheep to trees. Thanks to David MacIver for alerting me to this one. I first encountered the trope in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “The Simple Truth↗︎︎,” which draws many, but not all, of the same conclusions I do.
  • 2. To some, this may seem a ridiculously detailed proof for an obvious proposition. If you are a logician, you might instead consider it a lot of vague hand-waving and hot air. If you want to be really sure, you can formalize the problem with the Presburger axioms↗︎︎ for addition. The Peano axioms↗︎︎, which cover multiplication as well, are famously impossible to prove consistent, so you shouldn’t believe anything anyone says about the times table. 3 × 3 = 9? Highly speculative! But Presburger arithmetic is provably consistent, complete, and decidable. You can give your proof to a program which will check it and definitively declare it to be absolute eternal truth. Phew, what a relief!
  • 3. The pebble-counting analogy is a deliberately simple case. It should not be assumed to extend into a general theory of representation—mental or otherwise. It depends on a constant close causal coupling, whereas we can represent states of affairs from which we are currently causally isolated; or that are hypothetical, so that no causal coupling is possible at all.
  • 4. The math presumably is eternally, absolutely, ultimately Correct; but rationality is not just math, it’s the use of formal methods in the real world.
  • 5. Try looking in a nearby stream. Water-polished pebbles are better behaved than field pebbles. The “object” idealization is more nearly true of them.
  • 6. Sheep aren’t always well-behaved objects, either. Exactly when a pregnant mammal becomes two mammals is not an objective fact, but—in the United States—a matter of intense political debate. Setting that aside, pragmatically, if a ewe goes out fat and comes back thin, you should reasonably expect an extra lamb, and adjust your count accordingly. Still more problematically, from a philosophical point of view, incomplete embryonic separation can result in what could be considered either “Siamese” twins or a “monster” with two heads. Whether that should be counted as↗︎︎ one sheep with two heads or two sheep that share body parts is not a well-defined question, and cannot be addressed rationally. Fortunately, this is not a practical problem. As a shepherd, you probably have at most one instance, so you can special-case it by making a reasonable judgement. If indeterminate cases were common, you’d have to come up with some more systematic way of categorizing them.

Interlude: Ontological remodeling

High-resolution MVIC image of Pluto in enhanced color to bring out differences in surface composition.
Object #134340

We have arrived at the midpoint of In the cells of the eggplant. In its first part, we saw how every attempt to make rationalism work failed, in each case because it denied↗︎︎ ontological nebulosity↗︎︎. The second part explains how meta-rationality works with ontological nebulosity to resolve the problems rationalism encountered.

Formal rationality usually works within a fixed↗︎︎ ontology, unquestioned and often implicit. That works well so long as the ontology is good enough for the job at hand. When it isn’t, total breakdown can result, because rationality has no way of repairing the breach.

Meta-rationality stands outside any particular ontology. It treats ontologies as malleable, and manipulates them explicitly. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates alternative ones.

Ontological remodeling—the reconfiguration of individuation criteria, categories, properties, and relationships—is a relatively advanced meta-rational activity. Ideally, we would build up extensive conceptual prerequisites before discussing it. The topic might be best left to the end of The eggplant—or, in fact, to some other text.1

Except that we need this idea to explain what sort of thing meta-rationality is. Namely, meta-rationality is itself an ontological remodeling of rationality.

This coincidence is potentially confusing. We need to recognize ontological remodeling at two levels:

  1. At the meta level, moving from rationalism to meta-rationality requires remodeling the fundamental ontological categories of rationality, such as truth, belief, deduction, induction, and so on.
  2. At the object level, ontological remodeling is a major aspect of the subject matter of meta-rationality.

So the shift from the rationalist to meta-rational view is an instance of the thing meta-rationalism describes. This is unfortunate, because it implies that meta-rationality is required in order to understand meta-rationality. Formal rationality doesn’t include an account of ontological remodeling, which is the skill needed to see the possibility of an alternative view. So meta-rationalism is a prerequisite for itself, which is part of what makes the shift difficult.

As always when something is a prerequisite for itself, you have to proceed in a spiral. An approximate understanding of a small part of the subject makes it possible to grasp more of it, and thereby to revise your understanding of the initial beachhead. You need repeated passes over the topic, in increasing breadth and depth, to master it.

So this “middle bit” of The Eggplant provides a rough, informal, partial account of ontological remodeling—enough to help the second major part make sense.

To make it concrete, I use examples taken from the history of science. I find them interesting for their own sake, and I hope you too find them enjoyable as well as enlightening.

The extinction and survival of categories

Often remodeling begins by recognizing that a category isn’t a well-defined grouping for which there can be a meaningful, unified story.

During ontological remodeling, a category may:

  1. Disappear completely
  2. Convert from formal to informal status
  3. Get a new formal meaning

A category disappears when it turns out there’s nothing in it—the entities it grouped don’t exist—or when it groups entities that have nothing meaningfully in common. In scientific history, categories like phlogiston, the luminiferous aether, and the Philosopher’s Stone turned out to have nothing in them, and got dropped. The taxon “Bestiae,” the Great Chain of Being, and the Hippocratic humors turned out to group genuine entities in useless ways, and so were also dropped.

The second possible outcome is that a category turns out to be too stubbornly nebulous for any formal account of it to work. Then it may hang on informally. It is no longer “officially” part of the new ontology, but people still talk about it, because it’s heuristically useful. Some or all entities in the category may get new, formal, detailed and precise accounts, which are actually much more accurate than before reformulation, but the general case remains vague.

Burning sugar with sodium chlorate as oxidizer

For instance, fire was an ontologically basic, formal category for thousands of years. After the Chemical Revolution↗︎︎ of the 1700s, it dropped out of official scientific theory. It’s an ill-formed category, because there are too many marginal cases. Informally, it describes redox reactions within a nebulous range of rates and temperatures, in which the oxidizer is typically but not necessarily oxygen. An explosion is a too-fast redox reaction; rusting is too slow to count; fuel cell reactions run too cold. Burning sugar with sodium chlorate as the oxidizer sure looks like a fire, but should it count? On the other hand, although “fire” is no longer a formal category, the Chemical Revolution made it possible to understand combustion in general, and particular redox reactions, vastly better than before.

“Species” was an ontologically basic, formal category in biology for thousands of years. Over the past few decades, better understanding of population dynamics has shown that it’s unavoidably nebulous. In general, there is no fact-of-the-matter about whether or not two individuals belong to the same species. However, as a consequence of that same remodeling, we understand speciation processes far better than when the category was taken to be well-defined.

In 2006, the category “planet” disintegrated into absurdity. It got a new, official definition, which most everyone loathes and ignores. Discovery of numerous marginal cases made it clear that “planets” have nothing meaningfully in common. However, we understand individual planets far better than before. And, “planet” is still useful as a vague category in some contexts, so long as you realize there is no fact-of-the-matter about whether Pluto counts.

In the third outcome of remodeling a category, it gets a new formal meaning. Gravity, for example, has been remodeled several times. It is not that we discovered new equations governing gravity each time—although that did happen. It’s that what gravity means changed. In general relativity, gravity is a wrinkle in spacetime; that is not what gravity is in Newtonian mechanics. Lumping and splitting are other ways a category can survive remodeling. The 2006 remodeling put Pluto in a newly invented category of “dwarf planets,” which (despite the name) are officially not counted as “planets.”

Informally, we can think of these three outcomes as points on a continuum. We might say a category is around 1.5 if it is mainly dropped as useless by experts, but retained in popular language, for instance. As for 2.5, whether or not a category counts as “basic,” “formal,” or “official” is itself often somewhat nebulous.

In The eggplant, I will concentrate on the second possible outcome of remodeling, although the others may be equally important in general. The meta-rational remodeling of rationality mainly demotes its categories from formal to informal status (outcome #2), but retains them as heuristically useful.

  • “Truth” comes out somewhere around 2.2. It’s best thought of as many different vaguely-similar nebulous ideas.
  • “Belief” may be somewhere around 1.6: a mostly-useless and misleading category if taken seriously, although it’s necessary for communication in everyday language.
  • “Rationality” gets a 2.7. It’s a grouping of usefully similar and reasonably well-defined methods that we should think about differently than we did before the meta-rational remodeling. There are marginal cases, though, so it’s not a 3.

Remodeling the planets

Diagram of the Ptolemaic universe
The Ptolemaic universe

In this section, I use shifting ideas about what counts as a planet as examples of ontological remodeling. I interweave scientific history with brief explanations of the meta-rational themes it illustrates. This isn’t a general history of the changing understandings of “planets”; I’ve selected particular episodes for their relevance to the themes of The eggplant. However, I find these shifts fascinating, both as science and as history, so I go into a fair amount of detail. I think you’ll learn some surprising facts!

Wandering lights

It has long been established, by both evidence and rationality, that the gods live in the sky. As gods are important, the sky is of great interest to scientists. Besides gods, who are rarely observed, we see three categories of objects in the sky, distinguished by their modes of motion:

  1. Transient objects with irregular, unpredictable motions, such as birds, clouds, and comets. These can be seen to be quite close to the earth, which is also characterized by chaotic unpredictability and transience, so this makes excellent sense and is consistent with rationality.
  2. The stars, which are eternally unchanging, and whose motions are perfectly circular. There’s a simple explanation: they are fires visible through tiny holes in a black sphere, centered on the earth, that revolves daily. The sphere is clearly hundreds of miles away, close to the immortal gods, so this is also highly rational.
  3. Seven wanderers, or “planetai” in Greek. These are↗︎︎ the Moon, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Unlike stars, they speed up and slow down, slew sideways, and sometimes even go backward↗︎︎. Unlike birds and stuff, their motions are somewhat predictable, but in ridiculously complex patterns. This is not so obviously rational. What’s up with it?
Animation of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars
Animation of the apparent retrograde motion of Mars, courtesy↗︎︎ Eugene Alvin Villar

Apparently the Wanderers are an intermediate category, for which we need a rational explanation. Aristotle and his colleague Eudoxus↗︎︎ figured out the basics, and Ptolemy↗︎︎ nailed the details. The planets are attached to spheres↗︎︎, made of pure, eternal, aetheric crystal. Through cunning arrangement of several dozen↗︎︎ of them, each moving in a perfect circle, the apparently complex planetary motions become perfectly predictable.

Or, to within a few degrees of angular error, anyway.

Unemployed angels, spirals, and the dark

What causes the aetheric spheres to rotate? Scientific opinion has varied. By the end of the Middle Ages, the general consensus was that each sphere was turned by an angel.

Then a revolution↗︎︎ put the celestial company of angelic laborers out of work. Lacking alternative opportunities for employment, they ceased to exist.

That is, by Galileo’s time, strong evidence had accumulated that there were no spheres, and therefore no angels. We have no need of that hypothesis.

This is an example of categories (aetheric spheres, angels) completely vanishing during an ontological remodeling: outcome #1.

By contrast, the question “what makes heavenly bodies move in such complicated patterns” has come through multiple remodelings intact (outcome #3). We’re still making progress on it. For instance, recent work on the magnetohydrodynamics of galaxies↗︎︎ seems to be converging toward an explanation for their previously-mysterious spiral shapes.

But we’re still far from a complete story. No one has a clue↗︎︎ about the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion. It is attributed to “dark energy”; but that is a mere dormitive principle↗︎︎: a science-y name masquerading as an explanation. “Acceleration requires energy by definition, and we can’t find any, so it must be ‘dark energy’.” But “dark energy” is not compatible with any currently-credible physical theory.

Copernicus remodels the planets

You will recall, from invented history, that Copernicus set off the Scientific Revolution in 1543 by proving that Aristotle, Eudoxus, and Ptolemy were wrong, because the earth goes around the sun. This did not happen.2 He did propose a heliocentric (sun-centered) model that became influential starting several decades after his death, however.

Copernicus retained all the previous ontological categories, including circular orbits and crystal spheres; they came through the remodeling intact (outcome #3). Mostly, only their relationships changed.

The category most transformed was “planet.” This had two intertwined aspects: an ontological remodeling of the category, plus empirical claims about the nature of specific objects.

Ontologically, where “planet” had meant “lights that wander in the sky,” it now meant “things that go around the sun.” Empirically, the claim was that all the old planets go around the sun, except the moon and the sun itself, so those are not really↗︎︎ planets after all. Most troublingly, the earth too goes around the sun, so it is a planet.

The earth does not wander in the sky; it does not glow like the planets; it is extremely large, whereas most planets are mere pinpoints. Why call the earth a planet? This made absolutely no sense in Copernicus’ time. The claim appeared not false, but absurd: a category error↗︎︎. But for Copernicus, the earth was a planet exactly in that it does wander around the universe, instead of sitting still at the center.

Maybe heliocentrism would have succeeded sooner if Copernicus used a different word for his remodeled category! This is a common pattern, though: an existing word is repurposed during remodeling. There is no fact-of-the-matter about whether “planet” denoted a new, different category, or if the category itself changed and kept its same name. As in the Ship of Theseus and Grandfather’s Axe↗︎︎ parables, the continuity of identity of categories over time is nebulous.

Heliocentrism: absurd on the face of it

It took well over a century after Copernicus for most scientists to adopt heliocentrism. That was not mainly because of opposition from the Church, nor due to blind adherence to traditional authorities. It was because empiricism and rationality both contradicted his theory. In fact, multiple heliocentric models had been proposed by the Ancient Greeks—Copernicus got the idea from them—and they were periodically revived up to his time. They had always been dismissed as fanciful, for lack of evidence or sense. So was Copernicus’—for a long time.

The puzzle is not “why didn’t scientists immediately adopt heliocentrism once Copernicus proved it was true?” but “why did anyone take him seriously at all, considering he failed to give any adequate reason to think it was true?”

There was no good observational evidence for heliocentrism until Galileo observed the phases of Venus in 1610. Copernicus’ arguments all invoked conceptual aesthetics, not evidence.

Copernicus’s model explained dramatically fewer phenomena than the state of the art.3 It is difficult to convey how extensive and important geocentrism’s implications were. It was woven, with rational arguments, into the whole Aristotelian and Medieval Christian worldview. All those explanations now seem absurd, but they were vital at the time. When geocentrism failed, the entire prevailing structure of certainty failed with it, and nihilism↗︎︎ became a serious threat. That was dispelled only when a new structure of explanation was constructed on the Newtonian model: namely, the modern world, or “systematic mode↗︎︎” of meaningness↗︎︎. (There’s an interesting parallel here with the nihilism precipitated in the 20th century collapse of the modern structure of understanding.)

Copernicus’s model gave no more accurate predictions of planetary motions than the best available geocentric models. And, contrary to the invented history you may recall, Copernicus’ model was no simpler than previous ones. In particular, it had more epicycles↗︎︎, which he needed in order to eliminate equants, another type of technical kludge that he particularly disliked.

There was also excellent evidence against heliocentrism. For example, the absence of stellar parallax was considered a fatal flaw until much later, when astronomers recognized that the “fixed” stars must be ridiculously far away.4

Heliocentrism: not known to be unfixable

Ibn al-Shatir’s epicyclic model of Mercury

All geocentric systems—there were many—assumed an ontology of perfectly circular motions. To account for the apparently non-circular motions of the planets, they used complex combinations of epicycles, deferents, eccentrics, and equants↗︎︎. These were, effectively, mechanical linkages and offsets that produced complex motions as combinations of multiple circular ones.

The problem was to hook these devices up in a way to generate predictions that agreed with observations. Thousands of smart people worked on this for thousands of years, tinkering with the details, and made essentially no progress after Ptolemy (around 150 A.D.). The best models as of Copernicus’ time still predicted eclipses wrong by a day, and the position of Mars by a degree.

For astrologers, a day or a degree makes all the difference! This was highly unsatisfactory and discouraging. Most thought that eventually the discrepancies would be ironed out with a sufficiently clever arrangement of epicycles, but others recognized that something must be wrong.

For decades, the only people interested in Copernicus’ work were astro-math geeks who spent all their time trying to reorganize the gears to make the machine give the right answers. The fact that his system made absolutely no sense, considered as physics or cosmology, was not relevant for them. Astrologers were practical men, chronometric engineers whose livelihoods depended on accurate predictions, not highfalutin’ philosophy.5

Copernicus’ system was just another arrangement of circular motions via epicycles, deferents, and eccentrics. And it gave no better predictions than the state of the art. But it was sufficiently different that it wasn’t known to be unfixable. Every imaginable variant on geocentrism had been tried, and found not to work. Copernicus opened up new opportunities for obsessive tinkering that held out a reasonable hope of progress.

And, it turned out that other heliocentric arrangements could and did give somewhat more accurate results. Quite soon, everyone else relied on heliocentric calculations for prediction, even while firmly holding that they were a purely mathematical fiction—because, interpreted as physics, heliocentrism was a non-starter.

This is a pattern. When you are stuck, an alternative ontology may be attractive, even in the absence of other virtues, by giving you new ways of thinking about the problem.

Meta-rationality: not known to be unworkable

Just as problems with geocentrism had been known for centuries, problems with rationalism have been known for centuries. The logical positivists fixed some, but eventually gave up on trying to fix the rest. After centuries of failed attempts by super-smart people to create a workable version, it remains possible that somehow someone can make the overall approach succeed someday—but it no longer seems likely.

Heliocentrism had been around for centuries, and was only initially adopted by Copernicus and a few others in desperation, because it at least was something new to try.6

Analogously, meta-rationality has been around for more than half a century,7 and we can at least say that it’s not known to be unworkable. There has been continuing progress in making it handle more details; it seems plausible, to some smart people, that it can eventually encompass and supersede the rationalist worldview. However, it hasn’t been fully worked out, and it hasn’t been explained well,8 and for at least those reasons it is not widely accepted—or even known of.

Mistaken theories accumulate kludgy patches until there is a better alternative. Failure to account for data does not cause the demise of a theory. Rationalism persists, despite its well-known inadequacies, because it’s clearly better than irrationalism and anti-rationalism, the only well-known alternatives.

A meta-scientific revolution

Heliocentrism may be the most obvious example of ontological remodeling, because Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions↗︎︎ highlighted it.

Historians agree that Kuhn’s book dealt the death-blow to logical positivism. That is not because he gave a knock-down argument against it; he didn’t attempt to. It is because, like geocentrism, it had become obvious that no one could make logical positivism work, despite decades of brilliant scientists and philosophers trying.9 Kuhn sketched an alternative that was radically different, plausible, and not known to be unworkable. And, it was easy to see how to fill in the details by doing more work of the sort he pioneered.

Kuhn had two big ideas. The first is that, if we want to know how science works, we need to look and see how people do it. That sounds obvious, and scientific. However, all previous attempts had been derived from a priori armchair theorizing about how, rationally, science ought to work. As soon as you compare those with reality, it’s obvious that they are totally false as accounts of how science does work. Somewhat less obviously, once you start to understand how science does work, you can see that rationalist ideas about how it ought to work are also wrong: it shouldn’t and couldn’t work that way.

By looking to see how science does work, Kuhn came to his second big idea. He found that science sometimes requires ontological remodeling, and that the type of reasoning scientists use for that is distinctively different from the type of reasoning they use when their ontology is adequate. During crisis periods, when an ontology breaks down, scientists evaluate, select, combine, modify, discover, and create alternatives. That is: “revolutionary science” requires meta-rational reasoning, whereas rationality is adequate for “normal science.”

Because he said that scientific progress depends on non-rational reasoning, Kuhn was widely misunderstood as advocating irrationalism—the only well-known alternative. Both his proponents and opponents jumped to the conclusion that, if he said scientific revolutions are not rational, he must mean they are intuitive, mystical, emotional, or political.10 That led to heaps of harmful New Age woo.

Kuhn’s confusing presentation11 also led to a horribly missed opportunity. Most scientists dismissed Kuhn’s observations. If he had explained them more clearly, scientists might have embraced them, and that might have led quickly to improved scientific practice.

Nevertheless, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an instance of the thing it describes. It was a dramatic ontological remodeling of the scientific understanding of a domain of phenomena: in this case, science itself.

It is no longer credible to make theories about how science does or should work without taking into account detailed empirical evidence. It is no longer credible to claim that science is a solely rational activity. And there has been no serious attempt to construct a new rationalist account of science since Kuhn’s publication.

Gerrymandering the solar system

Ceres
Ceres: Object #1

The planet Ceres↗︎︎ was discovered in 1801. It was found just where theory had predicted↗︎︎ there should be a planet, between Mars and Jupiter. Over the next few years, three more planets were found in the same region: Palas, Juno, and Vesta.

Planetary symbols
Planetary symbols, 1850

Vesta was the last new planet until the 1840s. Then, within a few years, there came a dozen more. Inventing new planetary symbols↗︎︎ for them became a headache. In 1851, that was resolved by giving them numbers instead. Ceres became object #1. But if they weren’t going to get planetary symbols, maybe they weren’t planets, even though they were “things that go around the sun,” which had been the meaning of “planet” since the heliocentric revolution. Anyway, they were small and boring, and who knows, there might be hundreds of them.12 The whole lot got demoted to “asteroids.”

Ceres and the others ceased to be planets—but “planet” was not actually redefined. There was no specific criterion given for why they didn’t count. For the next century and a half, “planet” was implicitly defined just as a list: these eight things (and then nine, with Pluto) are the planets. They share some family resemblance, so that was an entirely reasonable solution—although not formally rational. There were no marginal cases, so there was no need for a rigorous classification scheme.

As Heidegger observed in the seminal meta-rational text Being and Time↗︎︎, we only resort to formal rationality when reasonableness becomes inadequate. Even for most routine science, reasonableness does the job much of the time. When that breaks down, in a crisis, you need to step back and get rational. If that too fails—as it did in 2006—you have to get meta-rational.

“Planet” started to break down in the 1990s, as numerous marginal cases were discovered: both outside and inside our solar system.

The first exoplanet—orbiting a star other than our sun—was discovered in 1992, and many more soon followed. But this made practical a problem that had previously only been theoretical. What sorts of things orbiting a star count as planets?

There’s only three kinds of things that go around our sun: rocks, clouds, and snowballs. There’s all kinds of weird things going around other stars: gigantic diamonds↗︎︎, spacetime singularities↗︎︎, neutronium slag-heaps↗︎︎, and who knows what all else. Which ones should count as planets, and why? That problem made everyone uneasy; but it still hasn’t come to a head, and remains unresolved.

Meanwhile, there had long been reasons to think there might be more planets beyond Pluto, but none had been found. Starting also in 1992, several pretty big things↗︎︎ were discovered out there. Should they count as planets?

Well, who cares? “It’s just a word…”

The International Astronomical Union cares, that’s who. They have to care, because in 1851 it was decided that non-planets get sequential object numbers, and planets don’t. It’s the IAU’s job to assign the numbers, and either the new things had to get them, or not. (This was a weird echo of Ceres being reclassified partly because of trouble with assigning new planetary symbols.) The IAU reached no decision for a decade.

Finally, the issue was forced by the discovery of Eris↗︎︎, named—deliberately—after the Greek goddess of discord. Eris is more massive than Pluto. If the argument for denying planetary status to the new things was that they weren’t big enough, relative to some arbitrary cut-off value, then either Eris is a planet, or Pluto isn’t.

The question became intensely political. Not only did some astronomers have passionate opinions↗︎︎, so did the public. The public’s opinion was that they learned in school that Pluto was a planet, and who are these clueless ivory tower eggheads to say otherwise? It might be interesting to understand that irrationality better;13 but still more mysterious was the “rational,” “scientific” debate.

The problem was that there is no rational classification scheme that includes the nine traditional planets while excluding Eris and her Trans-Neptunian↗︎︎ friends.

In fact, there is no rational classification scheme that includes the nine traditional planets, period. They have nothing in common. Jupiter, for instance, is a medium-sized cloud, whereas Earth is a small rock. (Jupiter is “medium-sized” inasmuch as equivalent objects outside the solar system can get thirteen times bigger before they reach the critical mass for deuterium fusion and become brown dwarfs↗︎︎—objects that can’t make up their minds about whether they are big planets or small stars. Earth is “small” inasmuch as Jupiter has 318 times its mass and 1,321 times its volume.)

You could say that planets are “big enough” things that go around the sun; but what should the size cut-off be? You can bite the bullet and exclude Eris by demoting Pluto—which, to be fair, is much smaller than the other eight traditional planets. But then you have to pick some arbitrary size threshold, which doesn’t seem very rational. If you are going to do that, a more rational cutoff might fall in the huge gap between the small rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) and the big cloudy/snowy ones (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune).

Fortunately, there is another fairly natural size cutoff. Big enough objects collapse into a sphere, crushed by their own gravity. In 2005, as the crisis reached the boiling point, the most reasonable proposal was to define “planet” as “a sphere that goes around the sun.” This isn’t particularly rational, since it’s not clear why we should care either about going around the sun or sphericalness, but at least it’s concise.

Largest known Trans-Neptunian objects
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Wikipedia user Lexicon

This proposal would have made Ceres a planet again—but not any of the other asteroids, because they aren’t quite big enough to collapse. It would also include Eris and half a dozen other spherical things beyond Pluto. I would have liked that, because they are cute. However, there may be hundreds of spheres out there, and in 2005—just as in 1851—many astronomers’ opinion was that having hundreds of planets is not OK.

So that proposal was rejected. Instead, in 2006, the IAU added a third criterion: to count as a planet, an object has to “clear the neighborhood around its orbit.” Eris and Pluto were declared to have failed to do so, and were made non-planets. Pluto, which we discovered had never really↗︎︎ been a planet after all, got a belated number: 134340.

The IAU did not define what “clearing the neighborhood↗︎︎” means. No planet has fully cleared its orbit; there’s lots of minor junk↗︎︎ in Earth’s neighborhood. Various complex mathematical definitions have since been suggested, all of which involve some arbitrary numerical cutoff for what counts as the neighborhood and how clear it has to be.

The 2006 definition put spherical things that go around the sun but don’t clear their neighborhoods—such as Ceres, Eris, and Pluto— in a newly invented category of “dwarf planets↗︎︎.” Those are officially ABSOLUTELY NOT PLANETS, despite the name.

The word “dwarf” betrays the agenda here. What proponents really wanted was a size cutoff between Eris and Mercury, the smallest of the remaining “real planets.” That would preserve the traditional list as nearly as possible. However, there’s no rational reason for drawing a line there, so they came up with sciencey-sounding “clearing” criterion instead.

Ignored during the debate was what seems to me a serious bug. Jupiter doesn’t go around the sun, and therefore is not a planet by the 2006 definition.

Don’t believe me? In Newtonian mechanics, two bodies orbit their barycenter↗︎︎, or center of mass. If they have equal masses, the barycenter is the midpoint between them. If one is heavier than the other, the barycenter is closer to it. If one has much greater mass than the other, their common barycenter is located within the larger body, and the smaller object goes around that point. Only then is the smaller body said to orbit the larger one. Otherwise, the two form a binary system↗︎︎.

Jupiter is ludicrously heavy↗︎︎: it has 2.5 times the mass of everything else in the solar system combined, apart from the sun. The sun is much heavier still—but the barycenter of their mutual orbit is outside it. Jupiter and the sun are a binary system. Their barycenter is, to be fair, quite close↗︎︎ to the sun, and informally it may be reasonable to say Jupiter goes around it. But in terms of the formal definition, it doesn’t, so by the IAU criteria, Jupiter is not a planet.

Anyway, why is “goes around the sun” significant? If we’re interested in what’s there, we don’t care. “Goes around the sun” was meant to exclude large, spherical “moons,” seemingly just because they weren’t traditionally considered planets.

Jupiter is a useless blob, but its moons are the most likely places↗︎︎ to find extraterrestrial life. Ganymede, the largest, is bigger than Mercury; and several are compositionally similar to the rocky planets. Considered on their own, it would make better sense to group them with Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars than with snowball moons that aren’t much bigger than a breadbox.

The resulting ontology can only be described as “gerrymandered↗︎︎.” Arbitrary boundaries were drawn to include and exclude particular objects, resulting in a contorted mess:

IAU classification of solar system bodies
IAU classification of solar system bodies, courtesy↗︎︎ Wikipedia

Meta-rational lessons from a scientific failure

The planetary definition controversy, and its outcome, were a farce—as is widely recognized.

It is a case study in ontological remodeling having failed due to people trying to use rational, rather than meta-rational, methods. “There must be a correct answer” is the characteristic error of rationalist eternalism.

The problem in classifying solar system objects is that there are different dimensions on which they vary. For example, you could group them by their history (how and where and when they formed), their current characteristics in isolation (size, composition, surface temperature), or their orbital dynamics (barycenter, eccentricity, “neighborhood clearing”). These axes would cluster objects quite differently.

There is no correct answer—or, the right answer depends on what question you are asking. If you are interested in dynamics, it doesn’t matter what an object is made of; if you are interested in astrobiology, it doesn’t matter where it came from.

Meta-rationality treats all categories as inherently purpose-laden—including scientific categories. It rejects the rationalist ideal of perfectly disinterested Truth. Any useful categorization of solar system objects would group them according to a sub-discipline’s interests. Dynamicists and astrobiologists would naturally come up with different ones.

Meta-rationality accepts, applies, and coordinates multiple ontologies for a single domain. There isn’t a great example in our solar system, but astrobiologists exploring other star systems might need to take dynamical considerations into account. Hopefully they would have no difficulty holding both classification schemes in their heads at once. Investigating the ruins of an ancient civilization on an unusual natural object in the Alpha Centauri system, they should not get sucked into arguments about whether it is “really” a planet.

By trying to force a single, purpose-free ontology onto the solar system, the IAU process came up with a classification that is entirely useless. The legacy planet/non-planet distinction, which the 2006 redefinition did its best to preserve, does not line up with any property we now care about. Implicitly, it amounts to “observable with the telescope technology of the 1700s.” This is a pattern: people get attached to categories for irrational reasons, and find spurious, “rational” justifications for them long after they have ceased to function.

Meta-rationality treats all category boundaries as inherently nebulous and malleable. It recognizes that there are always marginal cases. Those have to be dealt with pragmatically—taking into account context and purpose—because there is no rational standard.

The IAU process took for granted that there had to be a sharp, definite distinction between planets and non-planets. (Saying “this is dumb, it doesn’t matter” was not considered an option. Either Eris was going to get a number, or not.) To its credit, the IAU recognized that an arbitrary size cutoff was irrational. However, faced with marginal cases, there was no other “rational” solution. The arbitrary cutoff was hidden behind the figleaf of the “clearing” criterion.

The problem the IAU faced was not one of linguistic ambiguity. It was not a problem with words and definitions. “It’s just a word!” was not a solution. It was a problem of ontology: how do we divide up the world? Once a boundary is chosen and agreed on, sorting out words is usually easy. (Especially for scientists, who understand better than most people that we can give technical terms any meanings we want.) Sometimes people get attached to particular words, and sometimes arguments are genuinely linguistic. However, in most arguments supposedly about word meanings, the underlying issue is ontological: where do we draw a boundary?

The IAU was aiming for remodeling outcome #3: an improved, formal definition of an existing category. What they got was outcome #2: the category has disintegrated, and de facto has no formal status. It’s widely understood that the 2006 definition is pointless and silly. The process crystalized the recognition that there is no longer any meaningful, definite category called “planet,” and there never will be one again. On the other hand, it remains perfectly reasonable to talk about “planets” in other star systems—so long as you recognize that this is an informal usage. Outcome #2 melted the category, but it is not that “there is no such thing as a planet” or “planets don’t exist.”

Pluto shoreline
Jagged shoreline of an icy nitrogen ocean on Pluto

Planetary science is now making extraordinary progress, without any meaningful definition. In 2006, almost nothing was known about Pluto besides its mass, diameter, and orbit. Last year, a space robot↗︎︎ sent back 6.25 gigabytes of information about it—and the discoveries are stunning. We now know far more about planets than when they were a (misleading) category. That knowledge depends on, and also implies, understanding the details of their heterogeneity.

We understand what each specific planet is vastly better than ever before. But we don’t have any general theory of planets, because they don’t have anything meaningfully in common (that other things don’t).

In the case of the planetary definition debacle, the various meta-rational lessons I’ve drawn here should be obvious—which shows that meta-rationality is not restricted to esoteric masters, but available to anyone with basic rationality skills.

Taking the same analysis to the meta level…

After the meta-rational remodeling of the rationalist categories “truth,” “belief,” and “reasoning,” we can understand specific instances much better than in the rationalist view. It is not that “there is no such thing as a truth” or “truth doesn’t exist.” But we can’t have any general theory of truths, because they don’t have anything meaningfully in common. Different, informal notions of truth apply in different situations. Meta-rationality looks at details to understand how “truth” operates in specific contexts, for specific purposes.

  • 1. See “A first lesson in metarationality” for an introduction to ontological remodeling. I’ll return to the topic only briefly near the end of The eggplant. Detailed discussion of methods of remodeling will have to wait for future texts.
  • 2. My main source for the history of heliocentrism is Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution↗︎︎, which I recommend highly. It is simultaneously super geeky and admirably easy to read. He wrote it sixty years ago, and probably there’s been significant historical research in the mean time. However, from casual investigation only, it appears that none of his main conclusions have been overturned.
  • 3. Copernican heliocentrism did explain some phenomena previous systems couldn’t. Particularly, it unambiguously determined the diameters of the planetary orbits. We’ll see that this is typical of ontological remodelings: the new and old models explain different subsets of phenomena, or explain them more and less well.
  • 4. Copernicus did give this explanation, to his credit. Stellar parallax was finally observed, after sufficiently accurate instruments were developed, in the 1800s.
  • 5. Besides astrologers, the other early enthusiasts for Copernicanism were Neoplatonic mystics. They thought, for spiritual reasons, that the universe ought to conform to simple mathematical rules; in their view Ptolemaic geocentrism was a godawful mess of kludges. The outstanding example was Kepler, whose heliocentrism was based on a Neoplatonic emanationist conviction that the Sun was God’s manifestation in the material realm, and therefore ought to be at the center of the universe. Fortuitously, his certainty that simple mathematical relationships must determine the cosmos led to his weird-but-true theory of elliptical orbits, which both dramatically simplified Copernicus’ system and gave much more accurate predictions. It also led to his elegant-but false theory that the distances between the planets related to the regular polyhedra. It’s interesting—but probably not significant—that the earliest advocates for what was later considered the first step in the Scientific Revolution were all woomeisters, who were right for the wrong reasons.
  • 6. In Copernicus’ own words: “I pondered long upon this uncertainty of mathematical tradition in establishing the motions of the system of the spheres. At last I began to chafe that philosophers could by no means agree on any one certain theory of the mechanism of the Universe, wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator, though in other respects they investigated with meticulous care the minutest points relating to its circles. I therefore took pains to read again the works of all the philosophers on whom I could lay hand to seek out whether any of them had ever supposed that the motions of the spheres were other than those demanded by the mathematical schools. I found first in Cicero that Hicetas had realized that the Earth moved [and so did various other ancients; Copernicus quotes them here]. Taking advantage of this I too began to think of the mobility of the Earth; and though the opinion seemed absurd, yet knowing now that others before me had been granted freedom to imagine such circles as they chose to explain the phenomena of the stars, I considered that I also might easily be allowed to try whether, by assuming some motion of the Earth, sounder explanations than theirs for the revolution of the celestial spheres might so be discovered.”
  • 7. One might take as founding texts Heidegger’s Being and Time↗︎︎, published in German in 1927 and in English in 1962; Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎; Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions↗︎︎; and Garfinkel’s 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology↗︎︎. Key later works include Kegan’s 1982 The Evolving Self↗︎︎ and Schön’s 1983 The Reflective Practitioner↗︎︎.
  • 8. Each of the books I listed as a key meta-rational text is famously difficult to read. I would suggest going to secondary sources before tackling the originals.
  • 9. Kuhn was in the right place at the right time. If he had published the same book thirty years earlier, it might have had much less impact, because logical positivism still seemed to be making progress.
  • 10. Intuition, mysticism, emotions, and politics do all play some role in most scientific revolutions—as they do in all human activity. They are not the way scientific revolutions produce better ontologies, though.
  • 11. One major problem was that Kuhn used the word “paradigm” for several quite different concepts. Consequently, “paradigm shift” has come to mean anything, and therefore nothing. (“Ontological remodeling” is one of the phenomena Kuhn was pointing at, but he didn’t use that phrase.) Another problem was that he didn’t apply any unifying label to the various sorts of reasoning I’m calling “meta-rational.” He just pointed out specific examples and some patterns. If he had labeled the category, it would have been easier to understand what he was contrasting with rationality. It would have been harder to imagine it was mysticism. His 1969 Postscript to the second edition tried to fix these problems, but it was already too late. If you read the book, don’t skip the Postscript! In fact, it might be the best place to start.
  • 12. A plausible hypothesis, but wrong. There are millions of asteroids, not hundreds. Probably billions, depending on where you arbitrarily cut off their lower size limit.
  • 13. Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a book about this, The Pluto Files↗︎︎, with many quotations from the public debate. It’s a lot of fun, but doesn’t give much insight into why anyone cared.

Part Four: Taking meta-rationality seriously

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

“Taking meta-rationality↗︎︎ seriously” means recognizing that any use of rationality involves meta-rational activity as well. Doing meta-rationality deliberately, rather than mindlessly following implicit defaults, can bring great benefit.

As of mid-2020, Part Four is unwritten, although I have extensive notes.

Topics

The invisibility of meta-rationality
If this is so important, why has no one ever heard of it?
Knowledge and understanding
Meta-rational epistemology.
When to get meta-rational
Feeling for when to step back from rationality because meta-rationality is required.
Meta-rational norms
Reasonableness and rationality have qualitatively different sorts of norms; so does meta-rationality.
Meta-rationality and Problems
Finding, choosing, creating, and defining Problems that are formal enough to apply rationality to them.
Opportunities for meta-rational improvement
Foreshadowed in Part Three: its analysis of rationality into parts reveals the sites at which meta-rationality can operate on it.
Meta-rational operations
Evaluating, selecting, combining, modifying, discovering, creating, monitoring, and maintaining rational systems.
Ontological remodeling
Feeling for an ontology; creating abstractions; when to sharpen an ontology and when to melt one.
System building
Using Part Three’s understanding of the moving parts in rationality to guide construction.
Engineering ontological infrastructure
Revising the reasonableness/rationality interface.
Reflection on purposes
Taking responsibility for whys; questions of motivation, value, ethics, and power.
Developing meta-rationality
Becoming meta-rational requires personal transformation, much more than book learning.
A research agenda
Better understanding of meta-rationality requires empirical research, which may have extraordinary practical and intellectual returns due both to inherent leverage and prior neglect. I sketch a program of outstanding questions, plausible approaches, and resource requirements.

Case studies

There is—and can be—no general method for meta-rationality; and its methods are necessarily nebulous. Nevertheless, there is much to say.

Where there are no general rules, a subject is often best explained with case studies. I expect those will be much of the content of the Part.

There is a difficulty, though. Typically case studies introduce or illustrate some simplistic principle that is supposedly extracted from them. That is impossible for meta-rationality, and would unhelpfully misrepresent it. A distinctive feature of meta-rationality is synthesizing a panoramic view of a system’s context and mastery of its intricate technical details to produce effective on-going activity in and around it. To accurately represent even one example of meta-rationality would require explaining far more specifics than is feasible. Writing this Part will, then, require a balancing act between falsifying the essence and overwhelming the reader with tedious details.

Part Five: Taking rational work seriously

HIV/SIV phylogenetic tree

HIV/SIV phylogenetic tree courtesy↗︎︎ Thomas Splettstoesser

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

Part Five puts meta-rationality to work.

Part Four explained meta-rationality in general. We looked at many specific examples, from many different fields, but they were brief, and may have left you wondering “how can I make this useful in my own work of rationality?”

Only you can answer that; meta-rationality bridges elegant abstract theory and the nitty-gritty specifics of real-world problems. You know about those, and I don’t.

However, between the fully general presentation and the details of the mess you personally will deal with today, there’s much to say about ways meta-rationality can help in particular fields. Indeed, a book, or many books, could be written about how to apply meta-rationality in any one domain of rational endeavor. I am unqualified to write any of those, not currently being an expert in any field. Still, I know enough about a few fields to make some suggestions.

Part Five explains ways to approach these meta-rationally:

  • Statistics (with probability theory as a warm-up)
  • Experimental science (with reference to the replication crisis and credibility revolution)
  • Software development
  • Entrepreneurship

I’ll end with a section I promised at the beginning of the book, explaining in detail how “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true. You may find the answer surprising, and the details involving.

Appendices

This page introduces a series of appendices that supplement Meaningness with reference information, including a glossary and suggestions for further reading elsewhere.

Appendix: Glossary

This is a glossary of words I've used in non-standard ways in Meaningness. Ones in blue link to pages that discuss them in more detail.

accomplishment
“Accomplishing” a stance↗︎︎ means adopting↗︎︎ it consistently whenever its dimension of meaningness↗︎︎ comes up. This is difficult and rare; perhaps psychologically impossible.
adoption
“Adopting” a stance↗︎︎ means using its pattern of feeling and thinking to address the dimension of meaningness↗︎︎ it relates to. Often one adopts a stance only momentarily, and typically without noticing it.
allied stance
Some stances↗︎︎ ally with others, based on a shared emotional “texture,” or on making similar promises, or because they provide plausibility for each other. For example, the stance True Self↗︎︎ allies with monism↗︎︎ because it is a ploy for explaining away your apparent limitations and differences from other people. Other stances clash with each other. For example, True Self does not go well with nihilism↗︎︎, because the True Self is supposed to be extremely meaningful, and nihilism denies↗︎︎ all meaningfulness.
antidote
Antidotes destabilize a confused stance↗︎︎ with patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that reveal its errors and harms, and that guide you toward adopting the corresponding complete stance↗︎︎ instead.
appropriation
“Appropriating” a confused stance↗︎︎ means using it as a communicative tool, while actually adopting↗︎︎ the corresponding complete stance↗︎︎ instead.
atomized mode
The atomized mode of relating to meaningness↗︎︎ abandons coherence, but provides access to all of globalized culture via the internet. The atomized mode resembles nihilism↗︎︎ because systems↗︎︎ of meaning are impossible. There are no standards for comparing value, so everything seems equally trivial, and equally a crisis. However, whereas the threat of nihilism is the loss of all meaning, the atomized world delivers far too much meaning, in a jumbled stream of bite-sized morsels, like sushi flowing past on a conveyer belt, or brilliant shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.
causality
The stance↗︎︎ that everything happens for a reason, in accord with the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎; except perhaps that free will allows us to violate the Plan.
chaos
Chaos is the stance↗︎︎ that nothing happens for any particular reason; the universe is essentially random.
choiceless mode
In the choiceless mode, you are unaware of differences of opinion concerning meaningness↗︎︎. You take meanings for granted, without asking “why” questions. It could also be called the communal mode or “tradition.”
commitment
Committing to a stance means resolving to adopt↗︎︎ it consistently, whenever the dimension of meaningness↗︎︎ it addresses comes up.
complete stance
Complete stances↗︎︎ acknowledge the nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎ of meaningness↗︎︎, avoiding the errors of fixation↗︎︎ and denial↗︎︎. They are more difficult to adopt than confused stances↗︎︎, but are more accurate and more workable in the long run.
confused stance
Confused stances↗︎︎ try to avoid the anxiety of ambiguity through fixation↗︎︎ and denial↗︎︎ of a dimension of meaningness↗︎︎.
Cosmic Plan
I use “Cosmic Plan” to refer to any idea of an ultimate source of meaning, such as God, the Absolute, destiny, Reason, highest consciousness, or whatever. All such ideas are inherently eternalistic↗︎︎.
countercultural mode
The countercultural mode of relating to meaningness attempts to develop a new, alternative, universalist, eternalist, anti-rational system for society, culture, and self, that is meant to replace the mainstream. I discuss two countercultures in depth, the monist↗︎︎ “hippie” counterculture of the 1960s-70s, and the “Moral Majority” counterculture of the 1970s-80s. Both failed because neither’s vision appealed to a majority, and they could not accommodate diversity, due to their universalism.
denial
Denial is the psychological strategy of refusing to admit the existence or significance of meaningness↗︎︎. It is one defense against the anxiety provoked by nebulosity↗︎︎. See also fixation↗︎︎, another defense.
dimension
Meaningness↗︎︎ has various “dimensions”: purpose, personal value, ethics, sacredness, and so forth.
dualism
Dualism is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that everyone and everything is a clearly distinct, separate, independently-existing individual.
enjoyable usefulness
Enjoyable usefulness is the stance↗︎︎ that purposes are co-created in an appreciative, compassionate dance with the world; both mundane and higher purposes can be meaningful; you might as well find things to do that are both enjoyable for you and meaningful for others.
epistemology
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, belief, and truth. An epistemology is a specific theory of what can be known and how; what a belief is, what justifies a belief; and what it means for something to be true. Compare ontologies↗︎︎, understandings of how things are.
essentialism
Essentialism is the view that every object has a well-defined, objective "essence": a hidden true nature, consisting of fixed properties that determine what sort of thing it is and how it must behave. Relying on fixation↗︎︎, it is closely related to eternalism↗︎︎, the denial↗︎︎ of nebulosity↗︎︎. Relying on definiteness, and with the assumption that the universe can be objectively divided into objects, with objectively definite properties, it is closely related to dualism↗︎︎.
eternal ordering principle
An “eternal ordering principle” (or Cosmic Plan↗︎︎) is any supposed fundamental basis for the universe, providing an ultimate source of value, ethics, and explanation. God, Fate, Rationality, The Absolute, Cosmic Consciousness, Progress, Science, and many other candidate fundamental principles have been proposed. The view of this book is that there is no such thing.
eternalism
Eternalism is the stance↗︎︎ that sees the meaning of everything as fixed by an external principle, such as God or a Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. It forms a false dichotomy with nihilism↗︎︎, which regards everything as meaningless. The stance of meaningness↗︎︎ recognizes the fluid mixture of meaningfulness and meaninglessness in everything.
ethical eternalism
Ethical eternalism is the stance↗︎︎ that there is a fixed ethical code according to which we should live. The eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ is usually seen as the source of the code.
ethical nihilism
Ethical nihilism is the stance↗︎︎ that ethics are a meaningless human invention and have no real claim on us.
ethical responsiveness
Ethical responsiveness is the stance↗︎︎ that ethics are not a matter of personal or cultural choice, but are fluid and have no definite source.
ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is the study of the methods people use to accomplish everyday reasonableness↗︎︎ and also technical rationality↗︎︎.
existentialism
In this book, existentialism means the stance↗︎︎ that meaningness↗︎︎ is subjective. In contrast, eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎ both assume that meaningness must be objective. Usually existentialists also say meaning should be a purely individual creation: a perfectly free choice, possible only when you throw off all cultural assumptions and social pressures. That is not actually possible, and existentialism collapses into nihilism when you seriously attempt it. The complete stance↗︎︎ is that all three are wrong: meaningness is neither subjective nor objective. It is a collaborative accomplishment of dynamic interaction.
fixation
Fixation is the psychological strategy of attaching spurious certainty and definiteness to pattern↗︎︎. It is one defense against the anxiety provoked by nebulosity↗︎︎. See also denial↗︎︎, the other defense.
higher purpose
“Higher” purposes transcend animal existence, such as creative production, disinterested altruism, and religious salvation. These could also be called "eternal" or "transcendent." Their value should survive your physical death, or have significance in realms beyond the material. Mission↗︎︎ is the stance↗︎︎ that only higher purposes are meaningful.
intermittently continuing
Intermittently continuing is the stance↗︎︎ that selfness comes and goes, varies over time, and has no essential nature.
maintain
To maintain a stance is to adopt↗︎︎ it continuously for an extended period. That is: to use it consistently to address the sorts of problems of meaningness↗︎︎ it applies to.
materialism
Materialism is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ according to which only self-aggrandizing, mundane purposes (such as money, sex, power, and fame) count as truly meaningful. It forms a mirror-image pair with mission↗︎︎, the confused stance according to which only selfless, transcendent, higher purposes are truly meaningful. “Materialism” also refers to the metaphysical belief that only things made from physical matter exist. Meaningness rarely uses it in that sense.
meaningness
“Meaningness” is the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless. It has various dimensions, such as value, purpose, and significance. This book suggests that meaningness is always nebulous↗︎︎—ambiguous and fluid—but also always patterned↗︎︎. Confusion about meaningness results from denying↗︎︎ nebulosity or fixating↗︎︎ pattern.
meta-rationality
Meta-rationality means thinking about and acting on rational systems from the outside, in order to use them more effectively. It evaluates, selects, combines, modifies, discovers, and creates rational methods. Meta-rationalism is an understanding of how and when and why rational systems work. It avoids taking them as fixed↗︎︎ and certain, and thereby avoids both cognitive nihilism↗︎︎ and rationalist eternalism.
mission
“Mission” is the stance↗︎︎ that holds that only your unique, eternal, transcendent purpose is truly meaningful.
mode of meaningness
How meaning fell apart” suggests a series of modes of relating to meaningness↗︎︎. In the choiceless mode, meaningness is taken as given, without question. In the systematic mode, meanings have to be justified. (This is closely connected with eternalism↗︎︎.) As systematic justifications break down, the countercultural, subcultural, and atomized modes are successive attempts to relate to the fragmentation of meaning. Finally, the fluid mode synthesizes the functional aspects of all the previous ones.
monism
Monism is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that All is One; that my true self↗︎︎ is mystically identified with the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎; that all religions and philosophies point to the same ultimate truth.
muddled middle
Confused stances↗︎︎ come in mirror image pairs: extreme views on meaningness↗︎︎. Each pair shares an underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption about the nature of meaning. A muddled middle is an attempt to compromise between the extremes, to find a correct middle way. These fail because they do not correct the metaphysical error. The stance that corrects the error is complete↗︎︎, meaning that it neither fixates↗︎︎ nor denies↗︎︎ any aspect of meaningness.
mundane purpose
Mundane purposes are those we share with other social mammals: food, security, reproduction, and position in social dominance hierarchies. They also include limited altruism, on behalf of one’s immediate relatives. Materialism↗︎︎ is the stance↗︎︎ that only mundane purposes are meaningful; higher purposes↗︎︎ are not. Mission↗︎︎ is the mirror-image stance that only higher purposes are meaningful, and mundane ones are not.
native mode
Your native mode of relating to meaningness↗︎︎ is the one you are most comfortable using. Typically people adopt the mode that is most popular during their late teens and early twenties. Thus, for most Baby Boomers, the countercultural↗︎︎ mode is native; for Generation X, it is the subcultural↗︎︎ mode; and for Millennials, the atomized↗︎︎ mode.
nebulosity
Nebulosity is the insubstantiality, transience, boundarilessness, discontinuity, and ambiguity that (this book argues) are found in all phenomena.
next stance
Because stances↗︎︎ are unstable↗︎︎, it’s common to wobble from one to the next, without even noticing. There are predictable patterns of which stances are likely to follow another as it becomes untenable, based on the emotional logic of the first stance’s failure and the next one&rsqo;s promise.
nihilism
Nihilism is the stance↗︎︎ that regards everything as meaningless. It forms a false dichotomy with eternalism↗︎︎, which sees everything as having a fixed meaning. The stance of meaningness↗︎︎ recognizes the fluid mixture of meaningfulness and meaninglessness in everything.
nobility
Nobility is the stance↗︎︎ that resolves↗︎︎ specialness↗︎︎ and ordinariness↗︎︎. Nobility consists in using whatever capacities one has on behalf of others.
non-existence
Confused stances↗︎︎ allied with nihilism↗︎︎ often insist that a particular sort of meaning is entirely non-existent. Such meanings are usually only nebulous↗︎︎ (vague), rather then absent.
obstacle
Stances↗︎︎ toward meaningness↗︎︎ are unstable because they are inaccurate, emotionally unsatisfactory, or both. These inaccuracies and unappealing aspects are obstacles to adopting↗︎︎ the stance.
ontology
An ontology is an understanding of how things are. Typically an ontology includes an explanation of what sorts of things there are, what their characteristics are, and how they relate to each other. Compare epistemologies↗︎︎, theories of what can be known and how.
ordinariness
Ordinariness is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that no one is better than anyone else, and that one’s value derives from herd membership.
participation
Participation is the stance↗︎︎ that there is no single right way of drawing boundaries around objects, or between self and other. Things are connected in many different ways and to different degrees; they may also be irrelevant to each other, or to you. Connections are formed by meaningful, on-going interaction.
pattern
Pattern is the quality that makes phenomena interpretable: regularity, causality, distinctness, form.
rationalism
Rationalisms are ideologies that claim that there is some way of thinking that is the correct one, and you should always use it. Some rationalisms specifically identify which method is right and why. Others merely suppose there must be a single correct way to think, but admit we don?t know quite what it is; or they extol a vague principle like “the scientific method.” Rationalism is not the same thing as rationality↗︎︎, which refers to a nebulous↗︎︎ collection of more-or-less formal ways of thinking and acting that work well for particular purposes in particular sorts of contexts. See also: meta-rationalism↗︎︎.
rationality
Meaningness and The Eggplant use the word rationality specifically for more-or-less formal, systematic rationality (and therefore not as including informal reasonableness↗︎︎). Rational methods are explicit, technical, abstract, atypical, non-obvious ways of thinking and acting, which have some distinctive virtue relative to informal ones.
really
“Really” is a weasel-word↗︎︎. It is used to intimidate you into accepting dubious metaphysical claims. When someone uses it, substitute “in some sense,” and then ask “in what sense?”
reasonable respectability
The stance↗︎︎ that one should contribute to social order by conforming to traditions.
reasonableness
Mere reasonableness is everyday, informal thinking and acting, in ways that make sense and are likely to work. Reasonableness is not formally systematic, and therefore not technically rational↗︎︎, but it is not irrational either. Much of In the Cells of the Eggplant is about synergies between reasonableness and rationality.
rejection
To reject a stance↗︎︎ is to try to avoid ever adopting↗︎︎ it as a way of thinking, feeling, or acting with regard to meaningness↗︎︎. This is the opposite of committing↗︎︎ to it. Both are difficult because [stances are unstable](/stances-are-unstable) and we naturally slide in and out of them without even noticing.
religiosity
Religiosity is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that the sacred and profane are kept always clearly distinct by the eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.
resolution
Confused↗︎︎ stances↗︎︎ are resolved by dissolving their fixations↗︎︎ and accepting what they deny. Specific “antidotes” or counter-thoughts are available that help with this.
romantic rebellion
The stance↗︎︎ of defying authority, in an unrealistic way, to make an artistic statement.
Romanticism
Romanticism—in this book—is the view that the True Self↗︎︎ is mystically connected with The Entire Universe. The "True Self" is spiritual and emotional and intuitive, so Romanticism is anti-rational. Romanticism is closely related with monism↗︎︎, since it imagines connections that do not actually exist. Unlike monism, however, Romanticism does not deny↗︎︎ all differences. Historically, it was primarily an aesthetic movement, based on the idea that ultimate↗︎︎ reality↗︎︎ expressed itself through the artist's True Self based on their special↗︎︎ connection.
secularism
“Secularism,” as used in this book, refers to the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that nothing is sacred.
selflessness
“Selflessness” is the confused↗︎︎ stance↗︎︎ that there is, or should be, no self. Some interpretations of the Buddhist doctrine of anatman are examples, as are some Christian ideas of saintliness.
specialness
Someone is thought to be special if they are given a particular distinct value by the (imaginary) Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. This is not actually possible.
stabilization
Stances↗︎︎ toward meaningness↗︎︎ are inherently unstable, because they fail to fit reality or are emotionally unattractive. One uses specific patterns of thinking, feeling, talking, and acting to stabilize a stance, making it easier to remain in it. Typically this is unconscious, but with practice one can deliberately deploy particular patterns to move from one stance to another.
stance
A stance is a basic attitude toward meaningness↗︎︎, or toward a dimension of meaningness. Most stances wrongly fixate↗︎︎ meaningness, or deny the existence or nebulosity↗︎︎ of a dimension of meaningness. Typically stances come in pairs, which form false dichotomies. The simplest examples are eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎.
subcultural mode
The subcultural mode abandons the attempt to find universal meanings suitable for everyone. Earlier modes of meaningness↗︎︎ claimed to base such meanings on some foundational eternal ordering principle↗︎︎—but there is none. Subculturalism abandons eternalism↗︎︎ and instead provides multiple “neotribal” systems of meaning that are meant to appeal only to small communities (subsocieties) of like-minded people.
system
“Systems,” in this book, are conceptual, methodological, and institutional structures that make claims about meaningness↗︎︎. These include, for instance, religions, philosophies, political ideologies, and psychological frameworks. A system includes a structure of justification, which explains why you should believe its claims, and typically grounds in an eternal ordering principle↗︎︎. I contrast systems with stances↗︎︎, which are much simpler attitudes toward meaningness.
systematic mode
The systematic mode attempts to justify all meanings with some explanatory structure. Typically, this system↗︎︎ builds on a foundational eternal ordering principle↗︎︎. The systematic mode is eternalistic↗︎︎, claiming to offer absolute certainty, understanding, and control. In the late twentieth century, it became clear that this is impossible, and the systematic mode failed.
total responsibility
Total responsibility is the stance↗︎︎ that we each create our own reality and are solely responsible for everything that happens in it.
true self
The “deep" or “true” or “authentic” self is an imaginary, inaccessible superior identity, which has a magical connection with the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎. “Depth psychology” is particularly big on the true self, but this confused↗︎︎ idea has become wide-spread.
ultimate
“Ultimate” and “ultimately” are words that often turn up in discussions of meaningness↗︎︎. They can be legitimate, but are often advertising hype, obfuscation, or intimidation.
unenumerability
The world is vastly more complex than any understanding of it. The relevant factors in any situation cannot all be identified—especially not in advance. In principle, nearly anything could affect nearly anything else, although in specific cases nearly everything is pretty much irrelevant. The full details of any situation are unenumerable: impossible to list or take into account.
victim-think
The stance↗︎︎ that “it's not my fault and I am too weak to deal with it.”
wavering
When you have committed↗︎︎ to a stance↗︎︎, but have not accomplished↗︎︎ it, then you are “wavering.” Wavering means that you are trying to adopt↗︎︎ a stance consistently, but are finding it difficult or impossible to do so.

Appendix: Further reading

Meaningness mainly re-presents material well-understood elsewhere. I have gathered ideas from several fields and explained them in terms a different audience will understand. Since most of the book is not yet written, you may want to go back to my sources to fill the gaps. You may also want to know where the ideas came from, to understand them in their original context; or go deeper and further than Meaningness ever will.

This page describes some of the texts that have most influenced the work, with brief explanations of how they are relevant. Some are articles, but most are full-length books. (I’ve linked those to Amazon, who send me about $3/day in exchange. So they want me to say “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”)

I have roughly categorized them by subject. I plan to add more texts, and more categories, as work on Meaningness proceeds. Here are links to the current categories:

Fundamental texts

These are all brilliant, major works. Historians agree that they represented significant intellectual breakthroughs at the time.

Most are also extremely hard going. That is at least partly because their authors were working at the edge of what was thinkable at the time, and struggling to explain insights that were at the limits of the authors’ own understanding. In several cases, I recommend alternative, secondary sources that re-presented these breakthrough works in later eras, when the ideas had been worked through and became better understood. Reading the originals is valuable, but may prove impossible without a guide.

Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the problem of nihilism↗︎︎ and eternalism↗︎︎—the fundamental theme of Meaningness—to Western thought. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that, ever since, the Continental branch of philosophy has consisted of working through Nietzsche’s ideas.

Nietzsche is fun and easy to read. Working at the edge of the thinkable, much of what he says is obviously wrong. It is often unclear whether he has made an actual mistake, or was joking, or was insane; or if he wasn’t sure—and didn’t care—whether he was serious.

I’ve read almost all his books, and recommend almost all of them, although his last few works are the best.

My favorite is Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer↗︎︎, which summarizes much of his thought. It is probably his most straightforward presentation of nihilism and eternalism. The single-page chapter “How the ‘True World’ finally became a fable↗︎︎” is an intense summary of his summary—and also of the whole Western philosophical tradition and what is wrong with it.1 He thought he was about to work out the solution to nihilism, and proclaimed it as:

Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.

Unfortunately he had a total, permanent mental breakdown a few months later, and so never wrote up the answer.

Nietzsche’s most famous work is Thus Spake Zarathustra↗︎︎, which is also the only one I wouldn’t recommend. It’s a tedious melodramatic parable, and the thinking is atypically muddled. People seem to like it because it’s a story.

Mipham

In Buddhist philosophy, the problem of nihilism and eternalism goes back a couple thousand years. I use Buddhism’s word “eternalism” because there’s nothing equivalent in Western philosophical language. That’s because eternalism has been Western thought’s main topic from the beginning. Fish have no word for water, and the two main Western ideologies—Christianity and rationalism—are both eternalistic. India had both eternalistic and nihilistic ideologies, and Buddhism positioned itself as the “neither of the above” alternative.

Unfortunately, the Buddhist analysis of nihilism and eternalism is a godawful mess. The first major author, Nagarjuna, was severely confused, but he was so extremely holy that you aren’t allowed to contradict him. So there’s two thousand years of brilliant thinkers trying to understand and explain the issues without quite saying that Nagarjuna got everything wrong. Despite that constraint, they made considerable progress over the centuries.

The Nyingma branch of Buddhism, to which I belong, considers Ju Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty↗︎︎ the definitive text. I think it gives a simple, obviously correct solution to the problem of eternalism and nihilism that Nietzsche first raised in the West. My original idea for Meaningness was to write a short, straightforward explanation of Mipham’s answer. I have failed spectacularly: Meaningness is several hundred thousand words so far, and is maybe 15% finished.

The Beacon of Certainty may be the most difficult book I’ve ever read. I absolutely do not recommend it—although I’m including it here because it is the root text for Meaningness. To make any sense of the Beacon, you need to have spent years studying less-difficult Buddhist texts.

Unfortunately, there is no less-difficult text I can recommend.2 The whole field sucks. Your best bet is to get oral explanations from someone who has mastered it. They are sometimes willing to say things in person that they wouldn’t dare write.

Mipham and Nietzsche wrote their major works around the same time in the late 1800s. Their life stories and works are parallel in fascinating ways.3 They both wrote abstruse academic philosophy and they both wrote wild, prophetic, heterodox quasi-religious allegories. I wish I could introduce them to each other.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time↗︎︎ was the first and most important Western attempt to solve Nietzsche’s problem of nihilism and eternalism.

The first part of Being and Time analyzed what life is like in a completely new way, which I think points toward the solution. Heidegger abandoned the fundamental eternalist↗︎︎ assumption that meaning must come from some ordering principle↗︎︎ such as God or rationality. He showed how life is structured instead by “circumspection,” a non-dual awareness in which everyday circumstances show up as always already meaningful in our interactions with them. This understanding of meaning as neither objective nor subjective, but interactive is fundamental to Meaningness.

Then Heidegger took a wrong turn. The further analysis of meaning he developed in the second half of the book was definitely mistaken (as he later acknowledged).

Being and Time was probably the most influential philosophy book of the 20th century. Jean-Paul Sartre completely misunderstood it and based his Being and Nothingness↗︎︎ on his further distortion of Heidegger’s most-mistaken part. That was the root text for mid-20th-century existentialism↗︎︎, and a lot of subsequent pretentious and harmful intellectual nonsense. More productively, Michel Foucault—discussed below—mainly wrestled with Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s problems.

Being and Time is extremely hard going—up there with the Beacon of Certainty. I’d recommend reading Hubert Dreyfus’ Being-in-the-World↗︎︎ first or instead. That is an explanation of the first, accurate part of Heidegger’s book. It’s not easy, but it’s much easier than Being and Time itself.

I’ve written about how Heidegger and Dreyfus influenced Meaningness briefly here.

Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two main books. His first, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus↗︎︎, was one of the central texts of logical positivism—the major rationalist-eternalist movement of the first half of the 20th century. Later, he realized that couldn’t work, and wrote Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎ to explain why. The book is probably the most influential in all of analytic philosophy. (The two major schools of 20th century Western philosophy were the Continental (French and German) and analytic (English-speaking) traditions.)

Working in parallel with Heidegger, but independently, Wittgenstein analyzed everyday practical activity, and came to the same conclusion. Meaning resides in interaction, rather than in our heads or in objects.

In a weird parallel, just as 20th century existentialism began as a drastic misunderstanding of Being and Time, analytic philosophy not only missed Wittgenstein’s main point, but has mostly promoted its exact opposite. Philosophical Investigations argues that language acquires its nebulous↗︎︎ meaning only in everyday practical use, and that philosophical problems mainly derive from taking it out of context. Analytic philosophy has tended instead to attempt to eliminate nebulosity by taking language out of context, in order to figure out precisely what it should mean. Wittgenstein was too radical for his age, and his supposed followers headed straight back to the apparent comfort of rationalist eternalism.

Philosophical Investigations is difficult, but not impossible to read if you have a basic knowledge of 20th century philosophy. I don’t know of a good summary or introduction to it. (If you do, please leave a comment below!) I would say that if you are going to read only one of this or Dreyfus’ Being-in-the-World↗︎︎, go for Dreyfus. It’s less difficult, more clearly relevant to current concerns, and—this is a controversial call—Heidegger is more important than Wittgenstein.

Garfinkel

Harold Garfinkel founded the discipline called ethnomethodology, which is the empirical study of everyday practical activity. Like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Garfinkel found that meaning lives in interaction. But whereas they derived their conclusions from informal reflection on personal experience, ethnomethodology observes other people doing meaningful things in meticulous detail—typically through obsessive analysis of video tapes. Particularly interesting for me are the many ethnomethodological studies of laboratory scientists running experiments.

Garfinkel’s major work is Studies in Ethnomethodology↗︎︎. It’s completely incomprehensible until you have got the main ideas from a less dense text by someone else. John Heritage’s Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology↗︎︎ is the best theoretical introduction, although it’s still not easy, and does not cover all important aspects of the field. Kenneth Liberman’s More Studies in Ethnomethodology↗︎︎ is a collection of examples, and could be a good way to get into the field bottom-up. Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions↗︎︎—discussed below—might be an alternative starting point, uniquely accessible to the STEM-educated, although it was not intended for the purpose.

Garfinkel was probably strongly influenced by Heidegger and Wittgenstein,4 although he didn’t acknowledge that. He was a coyote trickster… Carlos Castaneda wrote his first↗︎︎ two↗︎︎ books of fictional psychedelic anthropology as his Bachelor’s and PhD theses under Garfinkel’s supervision. Some scholars believe Castaneda’s imaginary guru, the “Yaqui sorcerer” Don Juan Matus, was based partly on Garfinkel. Don Juan advised Carlos to erase his personal history; Garfinkel seems to have followed that same advice, and it’s hard to figure out quite where his ideas came from.5

It’s also hard to figure out quite where they went. Ethnomethodology imploded in the early 1990s, for reasons I only partly understand. I want to encourage its recent revival.

Rationality and meta-rationality

Rationalism↗︎︎, an eternalist ideology, is false, as Heidegger and Wittgenstein explained. However, formal rationality often works. Indeed, it’s the basis of modern civilization, and therefore hugely valuable and important. So how and when and why does rationality work? Meta-rationalism↗︎︎ is the empirical investigation of that question. It has found some preliminary answers. Meta-rationality is the use of that understanding to improve the use of rationality.

Orr

Julian E. Orr’s Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job↗︎︎ is a detailed ethnomethodological study of circumrationality. That is the informal, “merely reasonable” work needed to make a rational system work. (My “Parable of the Pebbles” introduces this idea.)

The book describes the work of Xerox copier repair technicians. The rational systems they make work are (1) the operation of high-tech, rationally-engineered office equipment, and (2) the formal relationships between Xerox, customer companies that run the copiers, and the technicians themselves.

The engineers designing the copiers had little knowledge of how they were used in practice. Their products worked great in the lab. In the real world, they broke down every few days or at most weeks, and a Xerox technician had to drive to the customer site to repair them. The design engineers did not take into account relevant, uncontrollable context: customers ran them too much or too little, too sporadically, loaded supplies upside down, put in the wrong kind of toner to save money, pushed the wrong button, forgot to remove staples, housed the copiers in unventilated rooms where they overheated, squirted oil in random holes in hope of fixing the machine when it broke down, …

Xerox supplied the repair technicians with manuals with detailed instructions for how to diagnose and repair failures. These manuals were written rationally, from first principles, on the basis of what engineers thought might go wrong, rather than what did go wrong in practice. Most of the time they were unusable, due to not covering common failure modes, giving instructions that made no sense or that were physically impossible to carry out, suggesting a fix that would work but was more complicated or expensive than the practical one; or being outright false.

Circumrationality bridges the unavoidable gap between a tidy rational system and the nebulosity↗︎︎ of reality. A copier malfunction report is highly nebulous. Is it actually not working, or is the customer confused? Is it not working because it is broken or because its environment is hostile? If it is broken, what is wrong with it? This is initially uncertain and may never be definable. Copiers are enormously complex, and even individual design engineers do not understand every aspect of one. Taking bits apart, cleaning them, and putting them back together may solve the problem without your ever knowing what actually caused it.

Repairing a copier is usually improvisational; the rational plan in the manual won’t work. It’s done by finger-feel and by ear and by eye, as well as by constructing a plausible causal narrative from practical experience and reflection on a pattern of symptoms.

Talking about Machines is fairly short and easy to read. Orr omitted nearly all the dense jargon and peculiar syntax most ethnomethodologists employ. If you have experience fixing machines, you will enjoy numerous moments of recognition, as technicians gradually diagnose puzzling failures and improvise solutions.

Orr’s investigation of how repair was accomplished led to a major meta-rational remodeling. Xerox eventually accepted that technicians’ experience, understanding, and improvisational fixes were critical. Its computer science laboratory PARC built a wiki-like system↗︎︎ that let technicians exchange this knowledge globally. The system produced $15 million per year in savings for the company, as problems were diagnosed faster (decreasing labor costs), more accurately (so fewer expensive replacement parts required), and more reliably (so the machines broke down less often, making customers happier).

Dutilh Novaes

Tradition says rationality consists of thinking in accord with a formal scheme. Ideally, you close your eyes, put the grubby material world aside, and enter the metaphysical realm of pure abstractions. Discovering Eternal Truth amongst the Platonic Forms by way of Transcendent Reason, you return triumphantly to mundane reality with a Solution for a Problem, and hand it off to lesser beings to implement.

That’s not how any of this works.

Mainly, formal rationality consists of writing mathematical squiggles on paper, staring at them, cursing, crossing them out, reading them over again, and writing some more squiggles. Or it consists of typing lines of code at a computer, running them, reading the debugging output on the screen, cursing, reading your code again, adding a semicolon, and running it again. Or of transferring quantities of chemical reagents from one tube to another, ticking them off on a worksheet as you go, lest you lose track of where you are in the laboratory protocol.

The actual practice of rationality is just as material, perceptual, and error-prone as copier repair is.

The question then is why this works. How does covering a page in mathematical notation make possible feats of discovery and invention far beyond what “mere reasonableness” is capable of? Metaphysical answers should not satisfy. What, actually, are we doing? How does ink on paper causally produce a new semiconductor device or cancer treatment?

Key parts of this puzzle are put in place by Catarina Dutilh Novaes in her Formal Languages in Logic↗︎︎.

Humans are innately terrible at multi-step reasoning about novel or distant circumstances. In fact, we’re terrible at multi-step anything, and also at anything novel. Our brains evolved for routine activity in concrete situations, in which we could immediately perceive what action to take next. Brains are excellent at assessing local context to find the relevant factors. They are also great at retrieving relevant background knowledge, derived from experience of similar situations, to make sense of the current one.

We’re mostly only capable of multi-step procedures if each step changes the perceivable situation in some way that makes it clear what comes next. (“Doing being rational: Polymerase chain reaction” discusses this, with video analysis of a biologist losing track of what she’s doing, and examples of circumrational methods for staying on track.)

We are mostly only capable of single-step inference, consisting of interpreting our situation as meaningful in terms of relevantly similar past situations.

Formal rationality is a collection of technologies for overcoming these limitations by (1) blocking misleading distractions↗︎︎ from perceived and/or background factors that our brains want to claim are relevant, but that actually aren’t; and (2) making visible where we are in multi-step procedures.

If you are looking at a piece of paper you have covered in mathematical formulae, you are specifically not looking at the concrete problem, and can’t be overwhelmed with the details of its specificity. The terms in the formulae are inherently meaningless, preventing your brain from insisting you consider details of past situations. The page lays out the steps of the procedure in order; you can’t lose your place. The bottom formula on the page is the one you should be working on!

Formality is largely a mechanism for avoiding thinking (contrary to the rationalist tradition), because we’re so bad at it. Dutilh Novaes quotes Alfred North Whitehead↗︎︎:

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems. By the aid of symbolism, we can make transitions in reasoning almost mechanically by the eye, which otherwise would call into play the higher faculties of the brain. It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. (p. 185)

Dutilh Novaes works out the mechanisms and consequences of these insights in detail, in the domain of mathematical logic. That’s one I personally find exceptionally interesting, but I believe the argument applies to rational practice quite generally. If logic isn’t your thing, you might want to read the introduction and chapters 5-7, after skimming or skipping chapters 2-4.

Bowker and Star

Rational systems must view the world though some formal ontology. Usually these include a classification system, which demands that objects belong to categories. Due to nebulosity↗︎︎, no categorization can be perfectly consistent, complete, or accurate. There are always borderline cases, which could reasonably be assigned to either of two categories, and weird outliers that don’t fit in any of them.

In such cases, practical use of the rational system requires “merely reasonable,” non-rational, informal, circumrational work to figure out how best to classify the anomalies. Or, when that breaks down, meta-rational work to remodel the categories or the circumrational support practices.

Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences↗︎︎ explores the ways classification systems are constructed and used in practice. They discuss particularly the “infrastructure” a rational system requires to function. Infrastructure includes both circumrational human practices and artificial technologies such as paper forms, software programs, mechanical sorting devices, and process manuals. They also discuss in detail the meta-rational work of constructing and maintaining rational systems.

The book discusses several classification systems used by governments, with momentous, sometimes horrifying, and sometimes hilarious consequences. These include medical diagnostic categories and racial categories. Despite enormous efforts at rationality, classifying diseases is always sketchy. Because diagnoses are intertwined with criminal and welfare law, boundary cases and anomalies can result in appalling injustices. South African apartheid was monstrous; its application—the practices of racial reclassification of individuals—becomes absurd when examined in detail.

Here we see how meta-rationality can be a liberatory practice, by freeing us from classifications that were originally designed according to some political agenda, and which have come to seem rational, natural, and inevitable.

Things and people are always multiple, although that multiplicity may be obfuscated by standardized inscriptions. In this sense, with the right angle of vision, things can be seen as heralds of other worlds and of a wildness that can offset our naturalizations in liberatory ways. (p. 307)

Kuhn

No one has read Thomas “Paradigm Shift” Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions↗︎︎ because everyone thinks they know what it says. It doesn’t say that.

Kuhn had two big ideas, as I discussed in “A meta-scientific revolution.” The first was that if you want to know how science works, you have to look and see what scientists do. Rationalist theories explain how science ought to work, according to armchair theorizing from first principles. But it doesn’t work like that at all. And once you understand how it does work, from empirical investigation, you can see that it couldn’t and shouldn’t work the way rationalism prescribes, either.

Kuhn’s second big idea was that science sometimes requires ontological remodeling, and the type of reasoning scientists use for that is quite different from the type of reasoning they use when their ontology is adequate. During crisis periods, when an ontology breaks down, scientists evaluate, select, combine, modify, discover, and create alternatives. “Revolutionary science” requires meta-rational thinking, whereas rationality is adequate for “normal science.”

Because he said that scientific progress depends on non-rational processes, Kuhn was widely misunderstood as advocating irrationalism—the only well-known alternative. In a Postscript, added in the second edition, he explains clearly the difference between his view and anti-rational relativism. If you read the book, don’t skip the Postscript! In fact, it might be the best place to start.

Schön

Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action↗︎︎ is the closest thing we have to a manual of meta-rationality.

Schön observed in detail how experts in five technical fields addressed nebulous problems. He found that technical rationality—“the formulas learned in graduate school”—doesn’t cut it. Those methods only apply when a problem has already been well-characterized—that is, translated into a formal vocabulary. That is not what a civil engineer encounters in the field: what you find there is water and rocks and dirt, and it’s a mess. It’s not what a project manager encounters in a tech company: what you find there is a bunch of people squabbling about a slipped schedule, and it’s a mess. Rationality solves formal problems, but that’s not what expert professionals do. They transform nebulous messes.

Meta-rationality requires understanding the relationship between a particular clear-cut rational system and a particular messy, nebulous reality. The “solution” to a slipped schedule undoubtedly involves fiddling with a GANTT chart, or some similar project-management formalism. However, the mess can’t be “solved” entirely, or mainly, in this formal domain. The manager needs to understand how the GANTT chart relates to what people are actually doing.

There can be no fixed↗︎︎ method for this; it’s inherently improvisational. That does not imply mystical intuitive woo. It means a lot of well-thought-out practical activity, immersing yourself in the mess, and reflecting on how specific rational methods could work in this concrete situation.

Mastery of professional practice is not the ability to solve cut-and-dried problems. That’s for junior staff, straight out of school. Professional mastery is the ability to re-characterize a nebulous real-world situation as a collection of soluble technical problems.

Kegan

Robert Kegan’s model of adult psychological development profoundly shapes my understanding of meta-rationality—as well as ethics, relationships, and society. I wrote about his work overall here↗︎︎.

His two major books are The Evolving Self↗︎︎ and In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life↗︎︎.

Kegan’s account of meta-rationality is frustratingly abstract, but his explanation of the ways it restructures the self gives insights not available elsewhere.

I’ll discuss Kegan’s work again below, in the sections on psychology and ethics.

Computation, AI, and cognitive “science”

Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus was both the foremost English-language Heidegger scholar and the most incisive critic of cognitive science, especially artificial intelligence.

What Computers Still Can’t Do↗︎︎ was the most recent in his series of explanations of how AI went wrong. His arguments were dismissed as idiotic philosophical misunderstandings by the field for decades, but were mainly proven correct by time. It was AI that was an idiotic philosophical misunderstanding…

Being-in-the-World↗︎︎, which I mentioned earlier as a guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, also explained in detail how Heidegger’s understanding of everyday activity refutes cognitive “science.” (I put the word “science” in quotes to indicate that the field’s overall program was not scientific, but ideological, mistaken, and harmful. Lots of good and genuine science was done under the rubric “cognitive science” despite that.)

Dreyfus’ All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age↗︎︎, written with Sean Dorrance Kelly, has nothing to do with AI, but it’s much easier to read than his other books. It’s an inquiry into the problem of meaningness↗︎︎: how to avoid both eternalism and nihilism, by recognizing the inseparability↗︎︎ of nebulosity and pattern↗︎︎. I wrote a long series of tweets about it, with excerpts from the book, starting here↗︎︎.

Suchman

Lucy Suchman’s Plans and Situated Actions↗︎︎ is a remarkable cross-disciplinary synthesis. Originally trained in anthropology, Suchman also studied ethnomethodology, was a student of Hubert Dreyfus, and had thoroughly assimilated Heidegger’s account of everydayness and Dreyfus’ critique of cognitivism.

But she worked at Xerox PARC. In the 1970s, essentially all the elements of modern computer systems were either invented at PARC, or given their first practical implementation there. (See Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer↗︎︎ for a history.) PARC’s visionary director John Seely Brown then built an AI and cognitive science team that surpassed all but the top few university programs of the time.

So Suchman also learned to think and talk like a cognitive scientist, which made her uniquely positioned to bridge the conceptual gap between rationalist and situated accounts of practical activity. Her book was the biggest direct influence on my PhD thesis work, and much of my understanding of everydayness I owe to her.

In the early 1980s, Xerox bet its future on a physically huge, incredibly expensive, and vastly complicated new office copier. Unfortunately, no one could figure out how to use it.

AI to the rescue! Some of the foremost experts in AI action theory developed an intelligent user interface / tutoring system that told you exactly what you needed to do.

Suchman filmed famous cognitive scientists trying to use it… and the bafflement and swearing that ensued. If you remember Microsoft’s rage-inducing Clippy The Intelligent Office Assistant, you can imagine the scene.

By careful analysis of what went wrong in their interactions with the system, she showed how breakdowns were consequences of mistaken rationalist assumptions, and how they could be understood in terms of ethnomethodological conversation analysis.

Suchman’s relatively STEM-friendly language made philosophically sophisticated theories of action available to computer professionals. That changed the course of AI research. Plans and Situated Actions was even more influential in the fields of human-computer interaction and user experience design.

Agre and Chapman

As I recounted in “I seem to be a fiction,” Phil Agre and I eventually got Dreyfus’ critique of AI, with Lucy Suchman’s help. In the late 1980s, together we set about reforming the field to incorporate their insights.

Agre’s Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎ is the overall best account of his work, and of our joint work. It’s a unique masterpiece. Like Suchman’s book, it’s a synthesis of Continental philosophy, empirical ethnomethodology, and deep insights into what can and cannot be computed by brains—but in Agre’s book, there’s code too.

My book on our work was Vision, Instruction, and Action↗︎︎.

A brief theoretical overview was “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity,” available on this site.

Winograd and Flores

In the late 1960s, Terry Winograd designed SHRDLU, perhaps the most impressive AI system of all time. In the mid-’80s, he recognized that Dreyfus’ critique was mainly correct.

The first half of his Understanding Computers and Cognition↗︎︎, written with Fernando Flores, is a short, clear meta-rational account of human activity. It is written for the STEM-educated, and may well be the best overall introduction if that’s you. For some readers, it may be a bit too short, with not quite enough detail to enable you to grasp meta-rationality.

(The second half of the book is based on speech act theory, a rationalist account of language that seems to clash with the meta-rationalism of the first half.)

I took the title of my book In the Cells of the Eggplant from a dialog in Understanding Computers and Cognition:

A. Is there any water in the refrigerator?
B. Yes.
A. Where? I don’t see it.
B. In the cells of the eggplant.

Was “there is water in the refrigerator” true?

That question can only be answered meta-rationally: “True in what sense? Relative to what purpose?”

Smith

Brian Cantwell Smith is the foremost philosopher of computation. Actually, as far as I know, he is the only philosopher of computation. “Philosophy of Computation” is a field that doesn’t exist.6

“Right—because Church and Turing said everything that can be said about that!” Nope.

What is a computer? A computer is a machine that means things. If you fight your way through six CRUD screens↗︎︎ on a hotel reservation site, you reach a web page that means you have reserved a room on Woolloomooloo Wharf next weekend. If it doesn’t mean that, the page is meaningless and you will be greatly discommoded when you arrive and find the hotel is sold out.

Computers are meaning machines—and you will notice that our existing Theory of Computation, which derives from Church’s and Turing’s work, has nothing at all to say about meaning.

Cognitive science assumed that brains are computers, more-or-less, and that brains and computers mean things the same way. How? Philosophers of mind assumed that AI guys knew how computers mean things—but we didn’t. We assumed that the philosophers of mind knew—but they didn’t. Once Smith (originally an AI guy) realized this disconnect, he set out to figure out how computers do mean things. Which turns out not to be easy; but he’s still making progress.

On the Origin of Objects↗︎︎ is his first major report. One observation central to Meaningness, and to pretty much every work in this reading list, is that objects are not objectively separable. Yet meanings are about objects—Woolloomooloo Wharf, for instance. The objectness of the wharf is not inherent to it, but arises during your interactions with it. On the Origin of Objects includes an account of how. My account will be somewhat different—but Smith is one of the few people to ask the question clearly, and to offer a serious and detailed proposal.

Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach↗︎︎ is a uniquely playful exploration of the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Much of the book is presented in the form of comic dialogs between characters taken from Lewis Carroll. (Plus Terry Winograd, who appears as “Dr. Tony Earwig.”) But it also asks serious and deep questions about the nature of intelligence and computation, and gives insightful answers unlike those proposed by anyone else.

I don’t think Hofstadter’s overall approach was at all right, but all other known AI approaches also look like dead ends to me. If I were forced to choose one to work on, his might be the least unpromising.

I discussed some of Hofstadter’s best ideas in “A first lesson in meta-rationality.”

Psychology

Baumeister

Roy Baumeister’s Meanings of Life↗︎︎ is the project most similar to Meaningness in subject matter. It’s an exploration of the ways people think about the same set of topics I cover—purpose, value, self, ethics, sacredness, and so on.

I was annoyed all the way through it, because he says many things I was going to say, which I thought I had thought of first, and which I still haven’t had time to write up.

Mostly, he does not attempt to resolve these problems. Meaningness does. Or will. Any decade now.

Kramer and Alstad

Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad’s The Guru Papers↗︎︎ was mis-named. It discusses gurus only in passing.

Their book is a sprawling but brilliant discussion of the major topics of Meaningness—unity and diversity, self and other, sacred and profane, life-purpose, ethics, ultimate value, and so on. It is a memetic nosology↗︎︎—a classification of contagious harmful ideas, attitudes, and practices.

I wrote a brief introduction, plus extensive quotes, here.

Kegan, again

Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self↗︎︎ is the most sophisticated explanation I’ve found of the ways we relate self and other, and the ways we relate to our selves.

The book strikes many readers as a major revelation. It’s not only intellectually fascinating, making sense of so much of our lives—it’s also useful in practice as a guide to radical personal transformation.

Other readers find nothing meaningful in it. Tentatively, I suspect that’s not because they miss the point, but because Kegan’s framework simply doesn’t apply to everyone.

I wrote a detailed summary here↗︎︎.

Ainslie

George Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will↗︎︎ is one of the best books I know on what it means to be a self.

Selves are inherently nebulous. They begin as incoherent masses of conflicting impulses. We are functional to the extent that we can get those to agree to head in the same general direction most of the time, and not constantly sabotage each other. Kegan’s book is one account of how to do that. Ainslie’s is another. Their perspectives are extremely different, but—I think—compatible.

Bly

Robert Bly’s A Little Book on the Human Shadow↗︎︎ is another outstanding explanation of what it means to have a self. Again, the question is how to resolve internal conflicts. It’s written from an extremely different point of view (Jungian folklore interpretation) than Ainslie’s (mathematical game theory) and Kegan’s (Piagetian developmental psychology).

The Little Book was the basis for my nine-part series on “Eating the Shadow,” which begins here↗︎︎. It was also a major influence on my series on dark culture↗︎︎. Eventually I’ll present the same material quite differently in Meaningness.

Miller

Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior↗︎︎ explains how vast swathes of everyday activity are unconsciously devoted to advertising our personal qualities to others—rather than enjoying ourselves or making ourselves useful. It’s a fast, fun read, and you will discover things about yourself that are simultaneously horrifying and humorous.

Spent inspired my piece “‘Ethics’ is advertising↗︎︎.”

Csikszentmihalyi

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The psychology of optimal experience↗︎︎ is a bit dated, and a bit pop, but contains useful insights into enjoyment.

I discussed it in relationship to Vajrayana Buddhism here↗︎︎.

Ethics

Nearly everything that has been written about ethics, whether from a religious or secular rationalist point of view, is eternalistic↗︎︎. That is, it assumes that there must be some correct system of ethics that defines what is morally right. That assumption is mistaken and harmful: there obviously is no such system currently, and there are good reasons to believe there never can be one.

A very few people claim to be ethical nihilists, but they are either trolling or confused.

Only a handful of thinkers have tried to work out non-eternalist, non-nihilist accounts of ethics. The mostly-unwritten ethics chapter of Meaningness will develop this possibility.

So far, my most extensive writing on ethics has been a debunking of the modern Buddhist version↗︎︎. That series of posts does also include positive proposals↗︎︎, summarizing the Meaningness ethical approach, however.

Nietzsche, again

Nietzsche wrote extensively on ethics. In the popular imagination, he was a nihilist and therefore wicked, but in fact he rejected nihilism. His ethical thinking pointed at a complete stance↗︎︎ that avoids both ethical eternalism and ethical nihilism.

Among his ethical works, I recommend Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. Confusingly, there are now many English translations of each. I read the ones by Walter Kaufmann, the only ones available at the time. Both are included in the collection Basic Writings of Nietzsche↗︎︎, a bargain at $3.99 on Kindle. The more recent translations may be better; I don’t know.

Kegan, again again

Robert Kegan’s work began as an extension of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. I think Kegan’s stage 5↗︎︎ is the most sophisticated ethical framework available. It requires meta-rationality: relating different ethical systems to each other, and reflecting on their relationship with reality.

Among his several books, only The Evolving Self↗︎︎ discusses ethics.

Buckingham

In Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories↗︎︎, Will Buckingham writes that “we have always been at sea” when it comes to ethics. For thousands of years, philosophers and prophets have proclaimed the possibility of finding land: solid ground. But no one has ever reached any.

It is time, he says, to turn away from that eternalistic fantasy of ethical certainty. Instead, we can make genuine progress in our actual, groundless situation. Metaphorically, we can learn to be better navigators. We can study the winds and the waves and the stars; and can learn to steer around shoals, thunderstorms and whirlpools, guiding our ships into calmer waters where we can gaze at the sea and the sky and watch fish play.

When we recognize that ethics can only ever be a nebulous muddle—but is no less important for that—we can work together to resolve difficulties “with all the kindness, patience, and care that we can muster.” Buckingham concludes that “there is no way out” of the ocean, yet ethics offers “not an intolerable burden” but “the possibility of joy.”

Finding Our Sea-Legs is a fun, easy, sometimes-touching read. I wrote an extended review here↗︎︎.

Society and Politics

Seligman

Adam Seligman, working with other authors, has made major contributions to the understanding of nebulosity, porous boundaries, and meta-rationality, specifically in the political realm.

The two books of his I know are Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity↗︎︎ and Ritual and Its Consequences↗︎︎. I reviewed Ritual here↗︎︎.

Foucault

Michel Foucault was the most important philosopher in the lineage of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Unfortunately, his deliberate obscurity has allowed tendentious idiots to misuse his subtle ideas in support of simplistic political agendas.

The best introduction to his work may be Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics↗︎︎, by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow.

Unfortunately, Foucault’s premature death (of AIDS) prevented what might have become a complete meta-rational presentation. His last work—the multi-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality↗︎︎—is the best. It’s only incidentally about sexuality; it’s about self and society, knowledge and power, language and experience.

Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge↗︎︎ is one of the two root texts for postmodernism. Knowing this, you might not suspect that it was commissioned by the government of Quebec as a report on the influence of information technology on the exact sciences. Written in 1979, it’s astonishingly prophetic about the then-future impact of the internet—but that is not the reason to read it. You might also not suspect that, unlike the voluminous obscurantist blather of later postmodernists, it’s only 70 pages and reasonably clearly written.

Lyotard’s main topic is the breakdown of the systematic worldview in the face of nebulosity, and the persistence of multiple, functional, partial systems despite that. He aims for “a politics that would respect both the desire for justice [pattern] and the desire for the unknown [nebulosity].” This remains unfulfilled, and obstructed not least by the subsequent development of postmodernism—but I think still a worthy goal.

Haenfler

Ross Haenfler’s Subcultures: The Basics↗︎︎ is a short, easy-to-read, fun and insightful overview of one of the most important cultural forces of the past few decades. Most discussions of this topic are either pomo-academic and abstractly theoretical; or else are pop surveys describing the contents of specific subcultures (“here’s what goths wear”) without analysis of implications. Haenfler is a sociologist, and his book is about the structure and functions of subcultures, but he avoids jargon, irrelevant theory, and allusions to obscurantist French dudes. It helps that he’s an enthusiastic participant in some of the subcultures he describes, not an ivory-tower observer.

Haenfler makes many of the points I intend to cover in my chapter on subcultures. If you were intrigued by the hints in my introduction, but frustrated that I haven’t yet delivered on them, you’ll probably enjoy his book.

Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition↗︎︎, about fake history, is both insightful and very funny, in a dry and British way. I discussed it here.

  • 1. Because it’s highly condensed, it may be incomprehensible without some knowledge of the tradition. One key to understanding is that “Königsbergian” is a reference to Kant specifically. The supposed “true world” of Nietzsche’s stage 3 is Kant’s ding an sich, “the thing in itself.” That is the inaccessible “noumenon↗︎︎,” or true reality, as opposed to the defective “phenomenon” that appears to the senses. This is a catastrophically bad idea, which leads straight to nihilism.
  • 2. There are several books that claim to explain the Beacon. I haven’t read any of them all the way through, but I’ve skimmed the ones I could find, and I would not recommend any of them. They miss the point, as far as I could tell.
  • 3. I would very much like to know whether Western thought was a significant influence on Mipham. There was much more Western cultural influence in Tibet at the time than is usually recognized—because, a bit later, both Tibetan conservatives and Western Romantics propagated the myth that Tibet was a special pure realm untouched by modernity. I’ve had to work hard to stop myself from digging into Mipham’s personal intellectual history. It’s not realistic that there was any direct influence between Mipham and Nietzsche in either direction, but it’s not completely implausible that they developed independent, somewhat-similar responses to the same distinctively-modern conceptual problems.
  • 4. Since originally writing this, I’ve read more about his intellectual history, for example in Anne Rawls’ introduction to Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism↗︎︎. She makes a good case that Garfinkel’s insights were entirely independent of Wittgenstein’s; and that, while he studied the phenomenological school that included Heidegger, other members were bigger influences on him.
  • 5. Ixtlan↗︎︎, maybe.
  • 6. Since I wrote this, I’ve learned of William J. Rapaport’s Philosophy of Computer Science↗︎︎, which is not quite the same thing, but adjacent. It covers, as it says, the philosophy of computer science as a field, more than the philosophy of computation as such. It also covers the 1980s-era arguments over computationalism in the philosophy of mind. I haven’t read it, but it looks like a useful summary resource for the mainstream views on these topics. My thanks to Jake Orthwein for drawing my attention to it.

Appendix: Terminological choices

This page is unfinished. It may be a mere placeholder in the book outline. Or, the text below (if any) may be a summary, or a discussion of what the page will say, or a partial or rough draft.

This page will present a brief explanation for this appendix. In short, it explains why I chose particular words to use as unusual technical terms.

Terminology: Complete

Tern amidst clouds, symbolizing Dzogchen

I use the word “complete” to describe stances that allow nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎.

These stances↗︎︎ are “complete” in that they don’t deny↗︎︎ the existence of any dimension of meaningness↗︎︎.

The term “complete” is not ideal. An earlier version of this book used “non-dual”; but that word is taken to mean something else.

I chose “complete” partly because it echoes the Tibetan word Dzogchen↗︎︎. Dzogchen is the branch of Buddhism that most influenced this book. “Dzogchen” means “utterly complete.”

Terminology: Emptiness and form, nebulosity and pattern

Emptiness

Nebulosity↗︎︎ and pattern↗︎︎ are key concepts in this book. They are closely related to the Buddhist notions of ↗︎︎. For several reasons, I've chosen not to use “emptiness” and “form,” and invented these new terms instead.

First, “emptiness” in English has a common usage with regard to meaningness↗︎︎: it is the feeling of alienation that comes with rejecting it. Emptiness in this sense is an emotional correlate of nihilism↗︎︎, or the perception of meaninglessness. “Emptiness” in Buddhist philosophy means something different. Worse, what it means is related to the Western use, but in a complex way. Talking about Buddhist emptiness in a non-Buddhist context seems bound to cause confusion.

Second, the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and form is famously contentious. Various Buddhist schools each have their own explanations, and vitriolically attack each others’ interpretations. I don’t want to take sides in these battles. I also don’t want to argue about whether my own understanding or explanation of emptiness and form is correct (according to the standards of some Buddhist school or other).

Third, the philosophy of emptiness and form is also famously obscure. It is so abstract and vague that it is hard to know whether the divergent interpretations are actually discussing the same thing, or if they talk past one another because they discuss different topics. It is hard to know whether any of the writers in the field are talking about anything at all, or whether they are discussing something purely imaginary. It is hard to know how one could know which of the accounts is right, or even what it would mean for them to be right or wrong.1

As a result, it is unclear whether “nebulosity and pattern,” as I use the words here, are the same thing as someone’s version of “emptiness and form,” or not. My concepts are influenced particularly by the Aro gTér explanations of emptiness and form↗︎︎; but I am uncertain whether they are identical.

I think that it is probably possible to give completely clear and precise explanations of “nebulosity” and “pattern.”2 This might be useful to the philosophy of emptiness and form. Even for someone who believes “nebulosity and pattern” are different from emptiness and form, they are sufficiently similar that a clear account of one might clarify the other. It might at minimum serve as a challenge to Buddhist philosophers to formulate a comparably clear account.

But I am not going to do that in this book. This book is meant for a general readership, for whom a lengthy discussion of exactly what “nebulosity” and “pattern” mean would be a distraction. (Never mind a discussion of how they relate to the various Buddhist theories of emptiness—interesting as that might be to some.)

I have a sketch of another book on that subject. If only I could write everything at once…

  • 1. As it happens, I do have opinions about these questions. I may present them somewhere, someday; but I’m unsure that it would be useful. In any case, it’s a topic that doesn’t belong on this web site.
  • 2. Clear and precise enough for analytic philosophy. Some math would be required—enough to impress analytic philosophers.

Terminology: Non-dual

One vase?  Or two faces?

One vase? Or two faces?

The essence of this book is a method for resolving opposing pairs of confusions about meaningness. I would like to call these resolutions “non-dual.” Unfortunately, that word is taken to mean something else.

This book’s method draws on the Buddhist analysis of eternalism↗︎︎ and nihilism↗︎︎. Buddhism often describes the resolution of this opposition as “non-duality.”

A quick Google search↗︎︎ shows that, in current English, “non-duality” is almost always used to mean something different. Mostly, “non-dual” refers to monism↗︎︎: the doctrine that All is One, and all distinctions are ultimately↗︎︎ illusory.

Monism forms a false opposition with dualism↗︎︎: the doctrine that subjects and objects are definitely, objectively separated. In this book, I argue that monism is wrong, and that the main reason people adopt it is because it appears that dualism is the only alternative.

Using “non-dualism” to mean “monism” obscures other possibilities.

Potentially there may be many different alternatives to dualism, of which monism is only one. (This book advocates another.) It would be useful if all such alternatives could be described as “non-dualistic.” It is probably too late for that; “non-dual” is well-established as meaning “monist.”

“Non-dual” appears to have entered the English language as a direct translation of the Sanskrit word advaita,1 as used in Hindu philosophy. Hindu advaita is monist; it asserts that all beings are One with the Supreme Cosmic Spirit↗︎︎.

Buddhist “non-duality,” and the stances↗︎︎ I advocate in this book, are not monist; they reject both twoness and oneness.2 Individuals cannot be objectively separated, but neither are they identical (with each other, or with some sort of Cosmic Something). These stances are “non-dualist/non-monist.”

There has been considerable confusion on this point. The Buddhist view is often misunderstood as monist in the West. Often the Buddhist and Hindu “non-dualities” are mixed up. Using “non-duality” to mean “monism” has probably contributed to this confusion.3

  • 1. A- means “not,” as in “atheist”; dva is “two,” cognate with “dual”; -ita is “-ity.” Sometimes the historical relationship between Indian and European languages is obvious.
  • 2. There may or may not be a difference between Buddhist non-duality and the stances I advocate. Buddhist philosophy is sufficiently complex and obscure that it is hard to say for certain.
  • 3. I suspect that this confusion is partly deliberate. “Perennialism↗︎︎” is the evangelical strategy of describing all religions as distorted misunderstandings of monism. Advocates of monism often insist that Buddhist non-dual philosophy is actually monist, and essentially the same as Hindu advaita, but gets some details wrong. Buddhists reply that it is not monist, and that these “details” are its central point.

Against “really”

Body of light? WTF?

“Really” is a dangerous little weasel-word↗︎︎. It is used to intimidate you into accepting dubious metaphysical claims.

Here are two sleazy examples—one nihilist↗︎︎ and one monist↗︎︎-eternalist↗︎︎:

  1. (1a) Nothing really means anything.
  2. (2a) Human beings appear to be animals with bodies of flesh and blood, but really we are beings of pure potential, with bodies of light.

It is useful to reword “really” claims with “in some sense” instead:

  1. (1b) In some sense, nothing means anything.
  2. (2b) Human beings appear to be animals with bodies of flesh and blood, but in some sense we are beings of pure potential, with bodies of light.

These are honest statements. I think in some sense they may both true—whereas 1a and 2a are certainly false, but hard to argue with.

An “in some sense” statement invites questions:

  1. (1c) In what sense does nothing mean anything? How can I check that for myself? Why do things seem meaningful if (in some sense) they aren’t? Is the kind of meaninglessness you describe one I should care about?
  2. (2c) In what sense do we have bodies of light? Why can’t we see these other bodies, and what is unreal about the flesh-and-blood ones? What good is a body I can’t see? How am I supposed to use this alternate body?

We shouldn’t necessarily insist on answers to such questions—there might be legitimate reasons they are unanswerable, despite the truth or usefulness of 1b and 2b. But we should at least be able to ask them.

The power of “really” is to stop you from asking. If you can’t see that everything is meaningless, it means that you are just not smart enough to understand. If you don’t know that you have a body of light, it means that you are just not spiritual enough to see it. “Really” means “shut up, kid—I’ve got all the answers. I have access to the real world and you don’t.”

Statement 1a claims that in the real world (that you are too stupid to understand) everything is meaningless. Your belief in meaning is a delusion. 2a claims that in the real world (that you are too crassly materialistic to enjoy) people have bodies of light. The mundane flesh-and-blood world is illusory.

These are huge, implausible metaphysical claims. Defending them would be difficult at best. “Really” is a way of intimidating you into accepting them without explanation.

When someone hands you a “really” claim, try making it into an “in some sense” claim, and then ask the obvious questions.

When you find yourself making “really” claims (which we all do, sometimes), try and backtrack and restate them as “in some sense” claims. And then try to say which sense, and why you think so.

“Ultimate”: use carefully

M81 galaxy, Spitzer telescope image courtesy NASA

“Ultimate” and “ultimately” are words that often turn up in discussions of meaningness↗︎︎.

Two examples, one eternalist↗︎︎ and the other nihilist↗︎︎:

  • “The ultimate nature of Being is Love.”
  • “Ultimately, the mind is just a bunch of electrical impulses in the brain.”

These words can be used legitimately. Quite often, though, they are advertising hype: they mean “Wow, this is incredibly important, you better pay attention!”

They can also be weasel-words↗︎︎, like “really↗︎︎,” that are meant to intimidate you into not asking questions. “Ultimate” is wonderfully vague, and sounds impressive. The implication is that the speaker knows all about this ultimate reality, and if you don’t understand or don’t agree, it is because you are not good enough.

“Ultimate” simply means “at the end of something.” The questions one should ask are:

  • The end of what?
  • Is this something that (as implied) is on a scale or line or series, with an end point?
  • Is this scale one I care about?
  • Is the end point important?
  • Do I want to go there? Or is some middle point better?

In a case like “the ultimate nature of Being is Love,” it is unlikely that the speaker has any specific idea of what “ultimate” is supposed to mean. What scale is “Love” at the end of? This is self-important nonsense.

In “the mind is just electrical impulses,” the linear arrangement is one of successive reductions↗︎︎. The claim is possibly↗︎︎ true in some sense. But if it is, the question is whether it is usefully true, in a particular context. When is it useful to regard the mind as electrical impulses? Probably almost never.

Bad ideas from dead Germans

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), founder of Idealist spirituality

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) , founder of Idealist spirituality

Outside of traditional Christianity, most of what counts as religion and “spirituality” in America nowadays is actually recycled German academic philosophy from two hundred years ago. This might sound absurd, or irrelevant. In this metablog series, I hope to show that it is true, and that it matters.

First, what are these bad ideas?

  • Eternalism↗︎︎. Everything is given meaning by some eternal ordering principle↗︎︎.

  • Some Idealists called that God, and were theists. Some called it the Absolute↗︎︎, and were atheists.

  • It doesn’t matter what you call it, because it is perfectly abstract. It has no characteristics. It is beyond conception. You cannot detect it or describe it, except that to say that is extremely wonderful.

  • Perennialism↗︎︎. Because God has no characteristics, all gods are just personifications of the Absolute.

  • Therefore, all religions are one↗︎︎. Ultimately↗︎︎, they uphold the same great truths.

  • The differences between religions are insignificant. They are cultural superstitions that the wise set aside, but tolerate in spiritually immature people who require personal gods, myths, rituals, and paraphernalia.

  • Monism↗︎︎. All beings are really↗︎︎ just aspects of a single organic unity. Separateness is an illusion.

  • Therefore, details and specifics don't matter. They are trivial. It is the universal that is important.

  • Idealism↗︎︎. True reality is the domain of Spirit, which is pure and simple. The material domain is contaminating and unreal. It is full of complexities that just cause suffering. You should pursue spiritual realization and leave mundane affairs behind.

  • True Self↗︎︎. What most people mistake as their selves is just an outer shell, the ego. It is created out of social conditioning and is divorced from our true essence.

  • The true self lies beneath the ego. It is normally hidden, but can be accessed through special means.

  • Because all things are ultimately One, the true self is mystically connected or identified with the Absolute Unity. Therefore, it is incredibly vast and deep, in contrast with the narrow pettiness of the ego.

  • Romanticism↗︎︎. The important thing in life is to connect with your true self, and thereby with the Absolute.

  • The ego works by means of intellectual reasoning, which is bad. The true self is emotional and intuitive, which is good.

  • The job of an artist is to express the Absolute. Once the intuitive emotional connection is made via the true self, ultimate reality spontaneously pours through the artist into the physical world. An artist is, therefore, a special kind of person, a priest and hero.

  • Destiny. As individuals, as a species, or as the entire universe, we are heading towards an inevitable, grand endpoint in which unity with the Absolute will be completed.

All these ideas are probably familiar. Many are almost right, and perhaps none is entirely wrong. They do incorporate important insights. It is not an accident that they dominated university philosophy departments during the Nineteenth Century. They are central themes of the German Romantic Idealist movement.

They may have a whiff of the New Age about them. But they seem now to be increasingly accepted by masses of people who wouldn’t get anywhere near the New Age, and do not know or care where the ideas came from.

Historical research suggests that Romantic Idealism is, indeed, the primary basis for current pop spirituality. I will trace the complex history of this—I am not sure in how much detail—in future posts. (Transcendentalism↗︎︎ and New Thought↗︎︎ were two key points in the lineage of transmission, along with the New Age of course. Similar ideas can be found elsewhere, particularly in Hindu Advaita Vedanta↗︎︎. There has been direct influence of Advaita on Western mass thinking today; but the German connection is greater.)

Historical interest aside, the pressing question is why these ideas are popular now, and what to do about it.

Pop spirituality: monism goes mainstream

I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if tens of millions of people suddenly started spouting nonsense. I fear something terrible has happened.

I could be wrong. I have no statistics. But in the past few years, suddenly I hear seemingly sensible people going about saying “ultimately↗︎︎, it’s all one, isn’t it?” and “when you find your true self↗︎︎, you find the whole universe,” and “all religions teach the same truth.”

Some think they are Christians, and seem unaware that these ideas directly contradict core principles of Christianity. Some think they are Buddhists, and believe these are Buddhist principles↗︎︎. They get indignant when I tell them that Buddhism says the opposite. Most are “spiritual but not religious,” or choose not to put themselves into any category.

They are in a category, however. These ideas are called monism↗︎︎. They are not new. Until recently, though, monism in the West was mainly confined to the New Age.

Monism seems to have broken the banks of that reservoir. It has spilled over into our cultural “thought soup↗︎︎” of taken-for-granted ways of understanding the world.

Monism is approaching pandemic prevalence. I think it is dangerously wrong, and it is time for a global vaccination campaign.

In the next several posts, I will describe:

  • What monism is
  • Where it came from
  • How it entered the mainstream
  • Why it entered the mainstream
  • What is right about it
  • What is wrong with it
  • Why people adopt it, even though it is obviously wrong
  • Why existing critiques of monism have failed
  • How explaining a better alternative stance↗︎︎, which incorporates what is right about monism, may succeed

New Earth, Big Lie

Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose↗︎︎ has sold several million copies. I suspect it is the biggest single influence on the “spiritual but not religious” trend that is bringing monism to the mainstream.

It deserves its success. It is brilliant: simple, clear, elegant, friendly; and mostly—I find—wise. Unfortunately, woven all through it, there is a terrible error.

A superficial mash-up? No.

Not everyone is as impressed with the book as I am. The usual criticism is that it is a superficial mash-up of spiritual platitudes from many familiar sources. This, I think, is quite wrong—although an understandable mistake.

A New Earth is not superficial at all. Tolle explains core principles and functions↗︎︎ from two major spiritual systems. He has thought these through and understood them exceptionally thoroughly. The book is dense: every page has at least one significant idea. There is none of the usual self-help filler.

Tolle’s explanations are simple. I think that it is a good thing, although perhaps it gives the impression that his ideas are light-weight. He goes straight to the heart of the matter, without getting lost in complex concepts. He explicitly does not teach a system↗︎︎, with all the dogmatic beliefs, jargon, history, and rituals that go with those. People are used to the idea that difficult intellectual theories are the mark of profundity; I think that is quite wrong.

It is also not true that A New Earth is a mash-up of many religious traditions. This mistake can be forgiven, because Tolle goes out of his way to make it seem as though it is. For example, he quotes the New Testament once every couple of pages.

That is, I think, a deliberate misdirection. I can find no meaningful influence of Christianity in the book. Tolle probably put the Bible stuff in to reassure culturally-Christian readers that he’s not a Satanist or foreigner or something.1

I see only two significant sources for Tolle’s ideas. One is Buddhism, which is dominant, and which Tolle often explains magnificently.2

The other is monist↗︎︎ eternalism↗︎︎, which he probably got from German Idealist philosophy (although Advaita↗︎︎ Hinduism might also be a source).3 Monist eternalism is maybe a quarter of the book. It is what I called the “terrible error woven all through.”

Selling Oneness

Monist eternalism seems like it ought to be hard to sell. One of its core claims is:

You think you are Tyler Smith, 27 years old, gay, a web designer, living with your boyfriend in a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle. But you are wrong. Really↗︎︎, you are the entire universe. Also, you are God.

The obvious reply to that is:

No, that’s totally stupid. I am Tyler Smith. I’m quite sure; it says so on my birth certificate. And the whole universe wouldn’t fit in our apartment. When we moved in, the place didn’t even have enough room for our combined stuff. And, if I were God, I would know about it. God is supposed to know everything, right?

You sell monist eternalism by pointing out its alluring benefits:

Since you are God, you are immortal, all-powerful, and can stop worrying about the work project that’s behind schedule and whether your boyfriend is thinking of leaving or what.

The trick is to get that hook in while somehow neutralizing the “yeah, but I’m not God” reaction.

There are two traditional approaches to that. One is to invent a complicated explanation that supposedly proves that everyone is God, despite all evidence to the contrary. This line was perfected by Idealist philosophers two hundred years ago. It is still used by Ken Wilber↗︎︎, for instance; and similar intellectual obfuscation is used in New Age monism. It doesn’t work on most people, though. Your victim has to consider themselves smart enough that they believe they can follow the complicated explanation, but not actually be smart enough to figure out that it’s nonsense.

The other traditional approach is to say:

I am extremely holy and wise, as you can see because I wear a white robe and talk in a special↗︎︎, holy↗︎︎ way. In fact, I am God; so you have to believe what I say. And I say: you are God too.

This is a common Hindu approach. It works only on the gullible and desperate. Most people will reply

I can put on a bathrobe and talk funny, too, but that doesn’t make me God. Or you, either.

Between these two approaches combined, only maybe ten percent of Westerners are vulnerable.

The Big Lie

Eckhart Tolle has developed a new way to sell monist eternalism.

This is the “Big Lie” approach:

If you repeat an obvious falsehood often enough, with complete conviction and no attempt at defense, people will eventually come to believe it.

Tolle never gives any reason to believe the obviously wrong things he says, nor ever attempts to counter the natural objections.4 He just states absurdities as if they were plainly true; as though you will surely accept them if you try them on for a moment or two.

What held back earlier monist manifestations, such as the New Age, was the specifics of the systems. Monism was available only as the background world-view of complex belief systems. The specifics of these systems generally included beliefs and practices most people consider stupid.

Tolle has developed system-free monism:

What is arising now is not a new belief system, a new religion, spiritual ideology, or mythology. We are coming to the end not only of mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. (A New Earth, p. 21)

Apparently, this works. My impression (based on severely sketchy evidence, so take this lightly) is that the fraction of Americans who buy into monist eternalism has gone from a tenth to a quarter in the five years since A New Earth was published.5 Tolle can’t be the only reason, but I suspect he is the biggest single one.

Raising my game

It is easy to make fun of the New Age, which until recently was the main reservoir of monism. That’s shooting fish in a barrel.

A serious critique of A New Earth would be much more difficult; but also much more useful. Tolle presents monism clearly, simply, and elegantly. That demands a clear, simple, elegant rebuttal. A successful reply would not only clarify the issues for those it persuades to reject monism; it also would help committed monists understand what they’ve signed up for.

It’s difficult to respond to Tolle, because you can’t attack his arguments or evidence.

He doesn’t make any arguments; he simply states his beliefs as unquestionable, eternal Truths.

It doesn’t help to point out that what he says is factually false. Its falsity is obvious, but factual untruth doesn't bother monists. For monism, specifics (and the material world) are unimportant. What matters is the abstract, the general, and the realm of Spirit.

Mostly, Tolle doesn’t mention specifics at all. Occasionally, he throws in some “science fact” for color. All of these are mind-bogglingly bogus.

What we perceive as physical matter is energy vibrating at a particular range of frequencies. Thoughts consist of the same energy vibrating at a higher frequency than matter, which is why they cannot be seen or touched. Thoughts have their own range of frequencies, with negative thoughts at the lower end of the scale and positive thoughts at the higher. (pp. 146-7)

A monist might defend Tolle by saying: “How do you know what he says about vibrating thoughts isn't true? Isn't that just your perspective?” Of course there is a good answer to this, but it is not one that will persuade monists.

A successful critique of monism needs two parts:

  • It must make the case that monism is not just false, but unworkable in its own terms. Monism cannot deliver the emotional goods it promises.
  • It must provide a better alternative, not only to monism but also to dualist↗︎︎ eternalism (traditional religion) and to nihilist↗︎︎ materialism↗︎︎. (No matter what defects monism shows, people will stick to it if those are the only other choices.) The better alternative must also incorporate monism’s accurate insights.

A page-by-page explanation of what is right and wrong in A New Earth might be helpful. However, we need the positive alternative first.

  • 1. In fact, it appears that he is converting many Christians to monism. Those converts probably mostly do not recognize that monism is incompatible with the core Christian principles of sin and salvation, and that they are no longer Christians. (If you yourself are God, you cannot rely on an external god for salvation, nor are you capable of sin. I will discuss this in detail in my section on the dualist critique of monism.) If I were a Christian minister, I would be panicking about Tolle’s influence.
  • 2. He rarely credits Buddhism, however. I assume that this is because he believes that “Buddhism” as a religion is unacceptable to the mainstream, whereas some of its actual content is attractive. I think he is right↗︎︎ about this.
  • 3. His “pain body” stuff comes from psychotherapeutic theory. That’s arguably a third source, but it’s restricted to one section of the book.
  • 4. This is not completely true. He has a one-page “incontrovertible proof” that you are immortal (pp. 127-8), and a one-page explanation of why it appears you are not the entire universe when in fact you are (p. 276). But these are brief and half-assed.
  • 5. It seems that around a quarter of Americans are “spiritual but not religious”; I cited some studies to this effect on the previous page. I’m not sure what fraction of those are monists, but I think it is most. My estimate that a tenth of Americans were monists five years ago is strictly a guess.

The toxic power dynamics of Oneness

↗︎︎

The title is misleading. Kramer and Alstad started writing a book about problems in guru-disciple relationships. However, they realized two things: such problems are partly due to common “spiritual” misunderstandings of meaningness↗︎︎; and guru-disciple power dynamics are similar to other relationships of authority, with many of the same problems.

So they wound up writing a brilliant analysis of popular spirituality, which comes to many of the same conclusions as Meaningness. Their book also has many insights into authority in general. They intended to expand those into a much larger work titled Control; but it got out of control and they abandoned it.

In the 1970s, young Americans were naive about gurus. They also deliberately suspended disbelief, because they were desperate for solutions to the disintegration of the Western systematic mode of meaning. By now—probably even by 1991 when The Guru Papers↗︎︎ was published—everyone understood at least the basics of the power issues in the guru-disciple relationship; so maybe the title aspect of the book is no longer as relevant. Mind you, gurus keep blowing up↗︎︎ in sex/power/money scandals, which still seem to take many people by surprise, so maybe not. Anyway, the book is pretty good on guru problems, but that’s not the reason I got it.

I got it because it contains the best discussion I’ve encountered of contemporary American spiritual monism (“All Is One!”). A large chunk of that is available online↗︎︎, and I recommend it highly. But the book turned out to be relevant and interesting on lots of other topics, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

The remainder of this post is the notes I took while reading the book. I didn’t intend to publish them, but on re-reading, I think they may be useful for some readers. Even without significant editing, they seem to summarize the book quite well.

The notes

All page numbers are from the 1993 paperback edition↗︎︎. There’s a Kindle edition↗︎︎ now, but not when I bought the book. I’ve linked some points in the notes to pages I’ve written on the same topics.

4 “moral certainty… justifies control. A primary function of moral certainty is that it gives [someone] the right to tell people what to do. It is also used as the basis of self-control. This is why … moral certainty… [has] greater emotional appeal than the specific beliefs in which the certainty is grounded. But the beliefs are necessary in order to maintain certainty. Consequently, such beliefs are very resistant to change…”

24–25 “the major extant world religions all promulgate a “renunciate” morality↗︎︎…. [and] present self-centeredness…. as the villain… one must surrender one’s will to … God … which usually involves some kind of self-sacrifice”

25 Renunciation used to semi-somewhat work as a basis for morality; it did restrain some bad behavior; but it’s no longer functional

27 “certainty [is] more relaxing and comforting than living with ambiguity.”

41 Renunciation was basically the only way you could do any serious spiritual practice historically, because role expectations were so rigid that you had to “drop out” of society

42 “The appeal of renunciation is that to the extent one can do it, it does bring control over emotional states. This “dropping out” really amounted to “dropping into” other socially sanctioned roles … devotee, monk, [etc]…. It offered an oasis from the grind of life and an opportunity to explore…”

43 Guru scandals are often blamed on the individual guru’s imperfection, but the real problem is with the structure.

45–6 “Often a large component of spiritual seeking is the desire for a place of no conflict, where a benign, all-powerful intelligence↗︎︎ is taking care of things, and not incidentally, where one feels immortal again. … This means that what many people are seeking in the name of spirituality is not really to grow…a journey into the unknown. What is actually being sought is a return to the known.”

47 Gurus who claim omniscience seem more powerful/credible than those who admit uncertainty

47 “Enlightenment is conceived of as a static and absolute state…”

49 Exhilarating sense of becoming a “part of a well-oiled machine”↗︎︎ experienced in team sports

49 “Surrender is so potent precisely because it shifts control to an arena that is free, or more free, from one’s inner dramas and the conflicts involved in personal decisions.”

53 Spiritual growth is traditionally presented as “getting rid of the aspects of oneself that are disliked or disapproved of. … That’s why many people need to believe in saints. … giving hope that others, too, can at least become better, if not perfect.”

54 “Surrender to Christ and to a guru have similar dynamics, as they both bring about feelings of passion, a sense of purpose, and the immediate reduction of conflict and tension.”

55 “Surrender to a guru brings instant intimacy with all who share the same values. … many feel alone and disconnected. Acceptance by and identification with the group induce a loosening of personal boundaries. This opening … brings purpose, meaning, and hope.” “… quick, one-dimensional bonding…” “…. being totally cared for …” “feels like being protected by God”

61 “What many people crave nowadays is a sense of connection or union with something they consider sufficiently profound to give their lives meaning. The very act of surrender initially brings this about.”

64 “Having a mini-[mystical]-experience gives hope that grander ones will eventually occur.”

66ff “Guru ploys” – tactics for keeping disciples in a state of submission

70 “Since those without self-trust look for certainty in others, power is just there for the taking by anyone who puts out a message that tells people, with certitude, what they want to hear.”

71 “Detaching from possessions, relationships, and even one’s identity can at first make one feel better because they are the usual sources of psychological pain.”

73–4 On the claim that normal methods for evaluation of truth-claims do not apply to “higher” (“spiritual”) truths. “…critical faculties are disarmed…”

75 Abuse of paradox as a strategy for disarming reason (notably in Zen)

86–87 Attraction of moving up in a spiritual hierarchy; gives some power to people who were generally pretty lame before they joined the cult

91 “sexuality, if left unfettered, risks putting people out of control – and more importantly, out of religion’s control”

92 Celibacy gets people to commit to the guru/hierarchy rather than to lovers

102 Explicitly contra Sutric Buddhism↗︎︎, their view is that absolute selflessness is impossible [and, they argue later, undesirable]

103 If “control” is taboo, then actual control is exerted covertly via rights, duties, or supposed altruism (‘just doing what is best for others’)

104 Egolessness has to be a central virtue of hierarchic spirituality, because you’d be insane to surrender to someone who was self-interested. So guru has to claim to be selfless.

124 Purity orientation. Wanting to believe that someone (maybe a divine someone if not a guru) has a direct line on truth is closely connected with desire to believe that perfect purity is possible. Perfect purity is not possible, so purity orientation inevitably leads to self-mistrust. Since it’s obvious that perfect purity is not possible in the real world, religions create myth of a separate, pure, spiritual world; and this is the basis of much harm.

128ff Analysis of A Course In Miracles↗︎︎. Hardcore rejection of reality in favor of fantasy world of perfect purity. Total rejection of one’s own ability to reason; all actual experience is rejected as illusory.

130 A Course In Miracles is a bizarre mash-up of the nouveau sinless, guiltless Christianity with Hindu monism. This entails numerous, massive logical inconsistencies.

131 What those have in common is a renunciate morality (even if that’s covered in syrup).

132 A Course In Miracles as salvation from a divided self

133 Denying reality can make you feel better. But does this lead to a better world? No, because denying destructive, selfish tendencies does not actually make them go away. It doesn’t make death, isolation, and pain go away, either.

133–4 Maintaining denial actually requires constant surveillance of the thing you are pretending isn’t there. This deepens the internal splits that renunciation promises to heal. It requires the construction of a covert inner authoritarian to keep control over the “bad” stuff you reject. This inner tyrant is probably not strong enough to do the job on its own, so you submit to an external authority whose job is to strengthen the internal tyrant.

138 The “you create your own reality” meme requires that you totally create every aspect of it; otherwise, the question “how much control do you actually have” arises, and that’s what the meme is designed to prevent your having to confront.

139 “You create your own reality” can actually be valuable initially in getting you out of victim-think; opening you to new possibilities for action; letting go of blaming others; and in connecting you with a community of positively-oriented people instead of victims, bringing new life and energy and possibility.

141–3 Logical/philosophical problems with subjective idealism.

144 Connection of total responsibility meme with karma theories.

145 Historical origin of total responsibility theory in rejection of psychoanalytic determinism.

145 If everyone creates their own reality, your problems are not my problem; you created them, in order to teach yourself a valuable lesson. How convenient for me not to have to deal with your stuff.

145 “Why is there a lower self at all, or a higher self that needs to give the lower self a lot of painful lessons?”

146–8 More on problems with karma

149 “Control is fluid and ever-changing” [i.e. nebulous]. “to be human involves being both in control and out of control.”

149 The total responsibility stance “generates guilt and feelings of failure when reality obstinately resists the hoped-for omniscience.”

149 Total responsibility stance requires perfect causal isolation of individuals, which is untrue and attempting to live according to it is harmful

165 Moderate revision of traditional religion can’t work; if you remove renunciation, the whole structure collapses. There’s nothing much left

167 Analysis of fundamentalism as a response to the divided self. It’s motivated by fear of internal anarchy; that without external restraint, you couldn’t maintain control over evil parts of yourself, which would run amok. Fundamentalism actually deliberately makes this pattern worse, by reinforcing ideas of internal evil and undercutting self-trust.

167 Why is fundamentalist certainty appealing? Because surrender to it actually does (temporarily) end internal conflicts by tipping the internal power balance. This frees up a lot of energy, and in a social context creates powerful bonds with people who have made the same move.

168 Since the fundamentalist system↗︎︎ is itself the highest value, it’s totally OK to violate any rules in order to protect the system. Mass murder is fine in service of the Cosmic Plan↗︎︎.

170 Religions have to put themselves outside of history—eternal and unchanging.

172–180 Analysis of the new-model nicey-nicey Christianity.

185ff On Satanism. Similar analysis to my black magic series↗︎︎ on B4V.

189 “When anything is made sacred (higher), one can always justify sacrificing what is not sacred (lower) to it.”

205 “A truly whole person is one who can integrate the diversities within being human without denying any of them. Just as “good” people attempt to deny the cravings of the animal with them, satanists must deny their empathic caring aspects.”

205 Analysis of communism as a renunciate system (one sacrifices one’s individual desires to the good of The People, i.e. the state). Exceptionally clear failure of renunciate morality, because it didn’t have the excuse that cosmic justice↗︎︎ would be enforced in the afterlife.

218 “self-centeredness must be acknowledged as a real part of being human that is ineradicable, necessary, and even valuable.”

218 “justifications for the … abuse of power … often come from a pretense that denies self-interest.” In other words, the tyrant is doing everything for the good of The People.

218–9 “Puritanism involves always trying to get better (purer) – a never-ending task without respite, given that purity is defined in a way that denies the essential worth of being human…”

219 In talking about “internal parts” there’s a danger of over-reification of them

222 Internal splitting into “goodself” and “badself”. The badself has no moral authority (unlike the goodself, which gets external reinforcement), so it has to fight for power (vs. goodself) by various devious, morally illegitimate means.

(The analysis here is similar to Bly’s Little Book On the Human Shadow↗︎︎.)

223 “But the goodself is not as benign as its espoused values make it seem. Authoritarianism is usually masked by lofty ideals…”

223 “often in relationships one person’s goodself can try to control another’s badself, setting off a reactive battle for control between people.”

223 “The goodself embodies both the dominant and submissive aspects of the authoritarian personality. Since it uses external authorities to bolster its power over the badself and other people, it is conditioned to submit to authorities. The goodself then is dictatorial, judgmental, structured, often a puritanical harsh taskmaster; and above all it is fearful—fearful that without always maintaining control, one’s life would unravel.”

224 “This kind of inner division usually relegates much of self-centeredness and carnality to the badself, thereby distorting and exacerbating them. It also suppresses spontaneity, creativity, and enjoyment for their own sake because these expressions often undermine the goodself’s control mechanisms.”

223 “…suppressions ensure that if what is inhibited ever does break loose, it tends to go wild. This in turn confirms the worst fears of the goodself, verifying its need to keep in control.”

223–4 “A non-fragmented person could treat guilt simply as information that a discrepancy exists between one’s values and behavior… a divided person’s goodself uses guilt as a driving mechanism to remain in control.”

224 “Work and accomplishment, and the rewards and praise they bring, are mechanisms that can keep the goodself in control.”

226 The badself is “needed human expression that does not have an adequate voice–i.e. a historically well-articulated alternate set of values capable of validating needed expressions of carnality and self-centeredness.”

(This is why tantra is so important↗︎︎, I think—it’s perhaps the only religion that says carnality and self-centeredness are OK and necessary and in fact positive goods much of the time.)

226 Because it has no ideological support, “the badself’s route to power is subversion, seduction, and casuistry to sabotage the goodself’s rules.”

226 “People so divided both cage themselves and reactively try to escape their cage… ‘shoulds’… guarantee a life of conflict.”

226 The badself is obviously childish in trying to get around rules, but the goodself is also far from adult.

226 “The badself exerts a powerful allure–that of spontaneity, shameless self-indulgence, cutting loose, throwing caution to the wind, and other taboo enticements, including forbidden expressions of sexuality. Breaking out of the goodself’s boundaries can release a charismatic energy that is seductive to others…”

226–7 The mythic-archetypical outlaw hero offers “an outlet for a repressed culture by igniting a safe collusion with people’s badselves. Thus society put forth a double message: “Rebellion is bad and dangerous,” on one side; and “Rebellion is not only exciting and exhilarating, it is freedom,” on the other…. The double messages society puts out … fragment its members”

227 “Groups easily form around eliciting and reinforcing either the good or badself; these alliances serves as a mechanism to bolster the control of that side.”

227 The goodself is often destructive, using “purity” as a justification. Lynch mobs, law-and-order vigilantes, theocratic oppression.

228 The goodself and badself both need each other to justify their existence, so they unconsciously collude to create conflict. Becoming aware of this is the way to defuse the hostility and eventually heal the split.

229ff Analysis of addiction as a way the badself escapes the goodself.

252 “being fragmented makes it nigh impossible to tell the difference between what one really wants and “shoulds,” which are often mistaken for true desires. Conflict, resistance, procrastination, and guilt can be indications of a divided self that acts differently than it thinks it ought.”

253 “Becoming interested in seeing the nature of the game… curiosity… a respect that acknowledges the importance of each [self] can be the beginning of a more healthy inner dialogue.”

262ff Analysis of idealized theories of love: as selfless, unconditional, immeasurable, etc. These are impossible to live up to because they deny vital, necessary, positive functions of the psyche. Attempting to live up to them messes up relationships in several predictable ways.

263–4 Unconditional love is a real experience, but it’s inherently impermanent. It occurs only in particular contexts. In the moment, the context seems irrelevant, but over time the context is crucial. Explicitly, this is similar to mystical experience, which seems timeless and unconditioned in the moment, but actually cannot be protracted and depends on all sorts of conditions. See also p. 287 on this.

265 Ideologies of love that tie it to self-sacrifice. “This fosters masochism and martyrdom”

270 “Love has an energy that breaks open the boundaries of the self, and in doing so is a connector that brings joy and meaning beyond self-enhancement.” From this one can mistakenly conclude that selflessness by itself can produce love.

273 Ideals of pure love are entirely individualistic—you supposedly can love someone purely, regardless of what they do, or any other aspects of context. Some may conclude that “the worse a relationship is, the more one can prove one’s purity and love through sacrifice.”

274 The idea that love ought to be entirely separate from power and control is wrong. That would make love “pure”; and this is the same conceptual move that separates “the spiritual” from “the mundane.” (Or “mission and materialism,” in my terms.) However, “Attempting to purify love by eliminating power does not do so, but instead makes the way power is expressed less conscious and more covertly manipulative.”

274 Dominance and submission dynamics in love and in authoritarian cults.

275 “what feels like unconditional love is really a function of a context that is conditional on submission.”

279 It’s normal for adolescents to try to escape all forms of control, but insisting on this in adulthood is to remain a perpetual adolescent. “intimacy in adult relationships contains both the exercise of power and the desire at least sometimes to control the other.”

279 Traditional roles minimize conflict by setting rules for who controls whom in what ways. As these roles break down in contemporary society, power struggles are inevitable. (p. 283: “there are no formulas”) More on this on p. 299 too.

280 “To be open to a person, the world, whatever, is to be affected by it, which means one’s feelings are somewhat out of one’s control.”

281 You can’t entirely control your emotions. The more open you are to others, the less control you have.

284 Positive values of control in an intimate relationship. Willingness to do what the other wants can take you into unknown territory and this can be transformative. “Transformation comes from the interplay of control and surrender.”

286–7 Dominance and submission; sadomasochism; addiction to abusive relationships.

288–9 In non-traditional relationships, you have to take an engineering attitude [my terminology] to “is this working”. This involves “measuring” [their terminology] which is taboo in idealized theories of love.

290 “Once self-centeredness is acknowledged as a reality, the issue becomes how to deal with it intelligently.” More on relationship engineering.

292 “Forgiveness” as an aspect of idealized love. Depending on what is meant by this, it’s often stupid and self-destructive.

292–3 Defense mechanisms are valuable; that’s why we have them. We need boundaries. You have to decide intelligently how open to be at any given time. “You should always be maximally open” is idiotic.

294 “Understanding and empathy are more valuable in softening boundaries than ideals”

294 “becoming comfortable with ambiguity, which allows more freedom to change. The difficulty is that living with such ambiguity involves being aware of one’s changing boundaries and their effects. In contrast, set boundaries need less attention…”

295ff Religious justifications for unconditional love.

301ff Chapter on “Oneness, Enlightenment, and the Mystical Experience”

303 “Traditions that made an ideology out of the concept of Oneness created a morality that denigrated or made unreal the individual self with its individual interests. Any worldview that denies either the reality or importance of the individuated self ends up defining virtue as selflessness, which is achieved through self-sacrifice. When renouncing self-interest is the spiritual path, we define the morality as renunciate. Renunciate moralities have neither eliminated nor diminished self-interest, but have often made its expression more hidden and thus corruptible.”

304–5 Nice summary of the Oneness view.

306 Hidden dualism within Oneness view: Oneness is better than, and separate from, multiplicity.

306 “If unity is valued more than diversity, the inevitable result is the attempt to get to unity by negating or in some fashion lessening the value and importance of separation.”

306–7 Spirituality seen as re-identifying with Oneness instead of your self. “This results in making people’s concerns with their own individual lives the source of all problems. In short, this is the East’s way of making self-centeredness the villain.”

309 “Creating a special category called the “enlightened state” is itself a manifestation of an accumulation mentality, becoming the ultimate goal to achieve through accumulating merit and partially enlightening experiences.”

309 “The experience of unity feels timeless, but the concept of enlightenment turns a timeless moment into an “all the time” fixed identity that continues over time.”

310 “a spiritual path from the lower to the higher”

310 “Enlightenment is the way hierarchy is brought in by viewing a few individuals as special channels for, and greater manifestations of, this underlying unity.”

313 “Denying change in the spiritual realm is basically a fundamentalist stance used to protect the sacred and tradition. But perceiving deeply is a process that is necessarily historically embedded, for each epoch has its particular illusions that must be pierced.”

314 Boundaries are necessary, even if they are semi-permeable. Trying to make sense of life while denying this just causes confusion.

318 Sacralizing Oneness makes it inevitable that sacrificing one’s self (individuality) to it will be demanded.

319 “The danger in holistic thinking lies in not giving separation an equal place”

319–321 Refuting “the total interconnectedness of everything.” Most things don’t affect most other things.

320 “Often favoring such holistic horizontal thinking has within it an anti-hierarchical political agenda” (which they don’t agree with; they think hierarchies are necessary and useful).

321 “Freedom needs some degree of separation to operate.” (So you don’t have to be causally affected by everything.)

322 Against Buddhist “interconnectedness” bullshit. This metaphysics is always timeless and nonspecific. What’s connected with what?

324 “Once unity or interconnectedness is made sacred, a category is created that is not sacred—individuals and their individual concerns.” This as a basis for renunciate moralities.

325 “renunciate religions are all based on accruing and stockpiling spiritual merit and are accumulative to the core.”

345 Monotheism supplanted polytheism partly because it had a more coherent, reliable ethical system. Tribal, poly gods do whatever they want and favor their own families; there are no principles there. Monotheistic universalist absolutism does create a basis for cross-tribal trust relationships that were important in building large diverse societies.

348–54 Another chapter on Oneness, this time as contrasted with monotheism. General analysis is that it is more abstract, and more abstract systems are more powerful. (I don’t think this is quite right.)

350 “As the most abstract of all religious concepts, Oneness is therefore the most impervious to direct challenge.”

351 “Hindu Oneness accentuates permanence and so acted as a foundation for perpetuating the caste system.”

350–1 Covert dualism in Oneness view: between sameness and difference.

351 Abstracting the sacred from nature allowed religions to denigrate the latter.

352 Hierarchies within the abstract system mirror and justify social hierarchies of priestly (and sometimes secular) power.

359 Devaluing thought leads to uncritically naive thinking, and to unconsciousness of all these dynamics

361 Earliest sacrificial systems sacrificed material objects (food e.g.) Then renunciate moralities came up with long lists of more abstract rules to follow. The final development is valorizing self-sacrifice as such, as a general way of being. This is, of course, extremely helpful to rulers.

364 Cooperation and competition are not opposed to each other; most social activities involve both, woven together in different ways.

365 “If one values cooperation over competition, then it is very easy to remain unconscious of the competitive element.” Cooperation isn’t selfless; it’s usually aimed at personal benefit.

366 “Having one’s own spiritual advancement as the focus of one’s life is totally self-absorbed”

I seem to be a fiction

It’s the perfect postmodern nightmare. You wake up to discover that you are the anti-hero character in a novel. Worse, it is a famously badly written novel. It is, in fact, an endlessly long philosophical diatribe pretending to be a novel. And it uses all the tiresome technical tricks↗︎︎ of postmodern fiction. It is convolutedly self-referential; a novel about a novel that is an endlessly long philosophical diatribe pretending to be a novel about a novel about…

I’ve just read Ken Wilber’s Boomeritis↗︎︎. It’s all that.1

And it seems to be about me. I mean, me personally.

The book diagnoses the psychology of a generation. Many readers have said it is about them, in the sense that they are of that generation, and they discovered ruefully that Boomeritis painted an accurate portrait.

But the central character in the book is a student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who discovers Continental philosophy↗︎︎ and social theory↗︎︎, realizes that AI is on a fundamentally wrong track, and sets about reforming the field to incorporate those other viewpoints.

That describes precisely two people in the real world: me, and my sometime-collaborator Phil Agre↗︎︎.

Do you know about “delusions of reference↗︎︎”? They are a form of “patternicity”—seeing meaning where there is none. You believe that communications that have nothing to do with you, are actually about you. It’s a typical symptom of schiozophrenic psychosis.

Is Boomeritis actually about me? Or is my suspicion that I am the model for its central character a sign of psychosis? A question probably only of interest to me—but I’ll return to it at the end of this page.

Mostly, instead, I’ll explain ways in which the novel, and my work at the MIT AI Lab, are relevant to Meaningness. All three concern the problem of the relationship of self and other. They address the stalemate that has resulted from confused↗︎︎, polarized ways of understanding separation and connection.

Orange, green, yellow

Boomeritis is an overview of “Spiral Dynamics”, which is a big fat hairy Theory of Life, The Universe, and Everything. I don’t like those, but the book gradually persuaded me that this one can be useful.

Spiral Dynamics contrasts three worldviews, which for some awful reason are called “orange,” “green,” and “yellow.”2 You’ll find the first two, at least, familiar:

Orange

  • Rationality, science, technology, objectivity
  • Materialist, capitalist, pragmatic, utilitarian
  • Autonomy, independence, competition, results
  • Planning, controls, contracts, procedural justice
  • Detached, abstract, reductionistic, alienated
  • European (intellectual) Enlightenment; modernism

Orange tends toward dualism↗︎︎: the wrong idea that the self is totally distinct from the world.

Green

  • Spiritual, emotional, intuitive, subjective
  • Relativist, pluralist; diversity, multi-culti, “political correctness”
  • Consensus, dialog, community, process
  • Harmony, healing, self-realization, social justice
  • Connecting, supporting, sharing, togetherness
  • Eastern (spiritual) Enlightenment; postmodernism

Green tends toward monism↗︎︎: the wrong idea that self and other are totally connected.

The war of orange and green

You can figure this part out, right? These views hate each other; each thinks the other is the fast road to hell.

Yellow

The thing is, orange and green are both right.

They are also both wrong. Their virulent criticisms of each other are both correct. But their own central values are also both correct. We need the right parts of both, without the wrong parts.

That combination, supposedly, is yellow:

  • Big picture, open systems, networks, global flows
  • Flexible, simultaneous consideration of multiple perspectives
  • Tolerance for chaos, change, and uncertainty
  • Integration of ranking (hierarchy) and linking (community)
  • Caring combined with freedom
  • Voluntary, spontaneous cooperation rather than either win/lose competition or compulsory consensus processing
  • Capacity to act in both orange and green modes as appropriate

If this sounds less specific than the other two, it might be because “yellow” is a work in progress. I do think it’s pointing in the right direction, toward what I call participation↗︎︎. That is the way to avoid the false alternatives of monism and dualism.

special thing in the universe.

This disease is not restricted to Boomers. Not all Boomers have it, and many who are younger or older do.

After postmodernism

Postmodernism↗︎︎” is the academic version of the green worldview. Boomeritis was originally written as an academic/philosophical criticism of postmodernism. Wilber says it was pretty unreadable, when he’d finished; so at the last minute he turned it into a novel instead.

Postmodernism, although obscure and obtuse, is important because it is the dominant orthodoxy in academia, and university indoctrination is one of the main ways Boomeritis is transmitted to younger generations.

It is also important because, beneath its billowing briny blather, postmodernism’s green critique of orange is right.

The problem is that, on its own, green leads inexorably to nihilism↗︎︎. That is not obvious; Boomeritis spends most of its 456 pages explaining it. Here’s a super-condensed version:

  • If meaning is purely subjective, and you embrace all perspectives as equally valid, then at points of disagreement meaning completely disintegrates.
  • If ethics is merely cultural convention, there is no way to condemn↗︎︎ evils such as the “honor killing” of women who have been raped.
  • If everyone is automatically equal↗︎︎, there is no call to be any better than you are. There is no possibility of nobility↗︎︎.
  • If everyone is supposed to be equal, all differences must be due to evil oppressors. Anyone who is not an oppressor is an all-good victim↗︎︎. Since we are victims, the oppressors must be them. We ought to rebel↗︎︎ against the oppressors (and probably kill them all). But this is automatically doomed to failure, because (by definition) the oppressors have all the power (or else we might not be victims, just lazy). So we’d better not actually try to improve anything; instead, we’ll demonstrate sincerity with the vehemence of our denunciations.

After thirty years of chewing on such contradictions, it’s widely understood that postmodernism is unworkable. There is no way forward within the green worldview.

So now what?

What comes after postmodernism?

Shockingly few people seem to be working on that question. It’s hard, because green’s logic, its critique of orange, seems unassailable; yet it leads to a bleak dead end.

Somehow we need to integrate what is right in both the orange and green worldviews to produce some sort of “yellow.” This web site—Meaningness—could be seen as one attempt at that.

Boomeritis does a fine job of exposing the contradictions in green, and has decent sketch of what yellow might look like. But then…

Whoa! Ken, WTF?

Although I admire Boomeritis, I oppose much of Wilber’s other work. Mainly he advocates monist eternalism, which I think is disastrously wrong.

In fact, Wilber (together with Eckhart Tolle) seems to be the main source for a new form of pop spirituality. This movement repackages the German Idealist philosophy Wilber loves, in a glossy new “spiritual but not religious” form that particularly appeals to younger generations.

The key ideas here are eternalism↗︎︎ and monism↗︎︎:

  • Eternalism: there is a God (but sometimes we’ll call it something else, like “The Absolute,” to deflect the arguments for atheism).
  • Monism: you, God, and The Entire Universe are All One.5

Just at the end of Boomeritis, something really bad happens.6 [Spoiler warning:] The anti-hero (who may be me) becomes God.

Wilber proposes that becoming God is what comes after yellow—and the main reason to get to yellow is to go on to become God.

This quest to become God is a central theme in his other work, so I shouldn’t be surprised; but I am appalled.

It’s not just that I think it’s wrong. It’s that his own critique of the green worldview—its monism and its narcissism—seems to apply directly.

He recognizes the contradiction, and dismisses it. He makes the usual monist-eternalist move, which goes something like this:

When we say ‘God,’ we don’t mean God, we mean The Absolute, which is ineffable, and is the same as The Entire Universe. You have to admit that the universe exists. And when we say ‘you,’ we don’t mean your ordinary ego, we mean your true self↗︎︎, which is divine and pure, so there’s no narcissism involved. See? No problem.

This is hokum. There is no Absolute, you are not the entire universe, and there is no “true self.” This stuff is simple wish-fulfillment; a fantasy of personal omnipotence and immortality. (As I will explain in plodding detail in the book.)

Artificial intelligence

The interesting part↗︎︎ of AI research↗︎︎ is the attempt to create minds, people, selves.7 Besides the fun of playing Dr. Frankenstein, AI calls orange’s bluff.

Orange says that rationality is what is essential to being human. If that’s right, we ought be able to program rationality into a computer, and thereby create something that is also essentially human—an intelligent self—although it would not be of our species.

This project seemed to be going very well up until about 1980, when progress ground to a halt. Perhaps it was a temporary lull? Ironically, by 1985, hype about AI in the press reached its all-time peak. Human-level intelligence was supposed to be just around the corner. Huge amounts of money poured into the field. For those of us on the inside, the contrast between image and reality was getting embarrassing↗︎︎. What had gone wrong?

An annoying philosopher named Hubert Dreyfus had been arguing for years that AI was impossible. He wrote a book about this called What Computers Can’t Do.8 We had all read it, and it was silly. He claimed that a dead German philosopher named Martin Heidegger↗︎︎ proved that AI couldn’t work. Heidegger is famous as being the most obscure, voluminous, and anti-intellectual philosopher of all time.

I found a more sensible diagnosis. Rationality requires reasoning about the effects of actions. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult, and came to be called the “frame problem↗︎︎”. In 1985, I proved a series of mathematical theorems that showed that the frame problem was probably inherently unsolvable.9

This was a jarring result. Rational action requires a solution to the frame problem; but rationality (a mathematical proof) appeared to show that no solution was possible.10

Orange had turned against itself, and cut off the tree-limb it was standing on. Still, as we hurtled to the ground, we figured that we’d somehow find a way out. There had to be a solution, because of course we do all act rationally.

At this point, Phil Agre came back from a gig in California with a shocking announcement:

Dreyfus was right.

What?? Had Phil gone over to the Dark Side?

But with the announcement, he brought the secret key: a pre-publication draft of Dreyfus’ next book, Being-in-the-World↗︎︎, which for the first time made Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time↗︎︎, comprehensible.

Being and Time demolishes the whole orange framework. Human being is not a matter of calculation. People are not isolated individuals, living in a world of dead material objects, strategizing to manipulate them to achieve utilitarian goals. We are always already embedded in a web of connections with living nature and with other people. Our actions are called forth spontaneously by the situation we find ourselves in—not rationally planned in advance.

If you have a green worldview, you’re thinking “duh, everyone knows all that—we don’t need a dead German philosopher to tell us.” But it is only because of Heidegger that you can be green. More than anyone else, he invented that worldview.

Being-in-the-World showed us why the frame problem was insoluble. But it also provided an alternative understanding of activity. Most of the time, you simply see what to do. Action is driven by perception, not plans.

Now, seeing is something us AI guys knew something about. Computer vision research↗︎︎ had been about identifying manufactured objects in a scene. But could it be redirected into seeing what to do?

Yes, it could.11 In a feverish few months, Agre and I developed a completely new, non-orange approach to AI.12 We found that bypassing the frame problem eliminated a host of other intractable technical difficulties that had bedeviled the field.13

In 1987, we wrote a computer program called Pengi that illustrated some of what we had learned from Dreyfus, Heidegger, and the Continental philosophical tradition.14 Pengi participated↗︎︎ in a life-world. It did not have to mentally represent and reason about its circumstances, because it was embedded in them, causally coupled with them in a purposive dance. Its skill came from spontaneous improvisation, not strategic planning. Its apparently intelligent activity derived from interactive dynamics that—continually involving both its self and others—were neither subjective nor objective.

Pengi was a triumph: it could do things that the old paradigm clearly couldn’t, and (although quite crude) seemed to point to a wide-open new paradigm for further research. AI was unstuck again! And, in fact, Pengi was highly influential↗︎︎ for a few years.

Although arguably non-orange, Pengi was hardly green. Particularly, it was in no sense social. The next program I wrote, Sonja, illustrated certain aspects of what it might mean for an AI to be socially embedded.15 I will have more to say about this elsewhere when I explain participation↗︎︎, the nebulosity↗︎︎ of the self/other boundary, and the fact that meaningness↗︎︎ is neither subjective nor objective. This work is arguably “yellow,” in offering orange-language explanations for green facts of existence.

There was another problem. Pengi’s job was to play a particular video game↗︎︎. Its ability to do that had to be meticulously programmed in by hand. We found that programming more complicated abilities was difficult (although there seemed to be no obstacle in principle). Also, although perhaps ant brains come wired up by evolution to do everything they ever can, people are flexible and adaptable. We pick up new capabilities in new circumstances.

The way forward seemed to be machine learning↗︎︎, an existing technical field. Working with Leslie Kaelbling, I tried to find ways an AI could develop skills with experience.16 The more I thought about this, though, the harder it seemed. “Machine learning” is a fancy word for “statistics,” and statistics take an awful lot of data to reach any conclusions. People frequently learn all they need from a single event, because we understand what is going on.

In 1992, I concluded that, although AI is probably possible in principle, no one has any clue where to start. So I lost interest and went off to do other things.17

In Boomeritis, the anti-hero—who may be me—says:

I know, the computer part sounds far out, but that’s only because you don’t know what’s actually happening in AI. I’m telling you, it’s moving faster than you can imagine. (p. 306)

The reality, though, is that AI is moving slower than you can imagine. There’s been no noticeable progress in the past twenty years. And a few pages later “I” explain why:

There are some real stumbling blocks, things having to do mostly with background contexts↗︎︎ and billions of everyday details that just cannot all be programmed. (p. 331)

Delusions of reference

In Boomeritis, the AI plot is a paper-thin “frame story↗︎︎” around the long philosophy lecture.18 There’s just enough detail to make me think Ken Wilber did visit the MIT AI Lab, though.

I suspect that he read a draft of Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us↗︎︎, by Rodney Brooks, which came out the same year as Boomeritis. Rod was head dude at the AI Lab then—and was my PhD supervisor. Here’s an excerpt from his book:↗︎︎

The body, this mass of biomolecules, is a machine that acts according to a set of specifiable rules... We are machines, as are our spouses, our children, and our dogs... I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines. But this is not how I treat them. I treat them in a very special way, and I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis. Like a religious scientist, I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs and act on each of them in different circumstances. It is this transcendence between belief systems that I think will be what enables mankind to ultimately accept robots as emotional machines, and thereafter start to empathize with them and attribute free will, respect, and ultimately rights to them... When our robots improve enough, beyond their current limitations, and when we credit humans, then too we will break our mental barrier, our need, our desire, to retain tribal specialness, differentiating ourselves from them.

If you have read Boomeritis, you will find this sounds familiar.

So, was I the model for the book’s anti-hero? My guess is that Wilber had a conversation with Rod, who asked him what he did. Wilber mentioned German philosophy, and Rod said “hmm, that sounds like the stuff David Chapman used to go on about.”

“Who?”

“David Chapman. He was a student here a while back. After doing some nice mathematical work, he and another guy, Phil Agre, suddenly started ranting about existential phenomenology and hermeneutics and ethnomethodology. No one could understand a word of it. We figured they were taking too much LSD.

“But then they started writing programs, and the story gradually came into focus. Intelligence depends on the body↗︎︎; AI systems have to be situated in an interpretable social world↗︎︎; understanding is not dependent on rules and representations; skillful action doesn’t usually come from planning.”

“Whoa, that sounds like the green meme in Spiral Dynamics!”

“Well, whatever. Spare me the gobbledegook. Anyway, I was thinking along pretty similar lines at the same time, because I was building robots, and it turns out that if you want to make a robot that actually works, the whole abstract/cognitive/logical paradigm is useless. It’s a matter of connecting perception with action. I never got into all that German stuff, though.”

“So what happened to Chapman? It sounds like I should talk to him.”

I haven’t a clue.↗︎︎ He disappeared a long time ago.”

“What a bizarre story! You know, I’ve just finished writing a long boring book critiquing postmodernism, but suddenly I’m thinking it might work better as a novel…”

If that’s not what happened, the coincidental similarity of Wilber’s anti-hero to me (and/or Agre) would be almost as odd.

Perhaps, though, I am a historical inevitability. If I had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent me—and Wilber did.

Of course, I could just ask him. But uncertainty is more fun↗︎︎. “Yes” or “no” would remove the mystery, and the surreal groundlessness of not knowing whether I am a character in a novel.

Besides, it allows for retaliation…

Retaliation

It just so happens that I am writing a novel↗︎︎ myself. Actually, it is an endlessly long philosophical diatribe, thinly disguised as a web-serial vampire romance. Already it is showing worrying signs of postmodern literary gimmicks↗︎︎.

Naturally, as a sword-and-sorcery novel, it has a Dark Lord; a lich↗︎︎ king, who seeks to unite himself with God to obtain unlimited power.

I think you can guess where I am going with this…

Comments on “New Earth, Big Lie”

Pop Bayesianism: cruder than I thought?

Pop Bayesianism is an odd spiritual movement I've been puzzling over recently. In the new video above, Julia Galef explains how it has changed the way she thinks. I found her explanation startling.

This book—Meaningness—has much in common with the Bayesian movement. Both aim to improve the way regular people think. We want to provide tools for noticing and escaping common, mistaken, emotionally-laden patterns of thought, which often cause big trouble.

Unfortunately, I think Bayesianism is also mistaken, and maybe harmful; yet many smart, well-meaning people get caught up in it. As a social phenomenon, it is fascinating, yet baffling.

Teaching probability

On a charitable interpretation of pop Bayesianism, its message is:

Everyone needs to understand basic probability theory!

That is a sentiment I agree with violently. I think most people could understand probability, and it should be taught in high school. It’s not really difficult, and it’s incredibly valuable. For instance, many public policy issues can’t properly be understood without probability theory.

Unfortunately, if this is the pop Bayesians’ agenda, they aren’t going at it right. They preach almost exclusively a formula called Bayes’ Rule. (The start of Julia Galef’s video features it in neon.) That is not a good way to teach probability.

Bayes' formula

Bayes’ Rule is hard to understand on its own. If you try to teach people just that, they are not going to get it. Also, the formula is almost never useful in everyday life.

On the other hand, once you understand the basic principles of probability, Bayes’ Rule is obvious, and not particularly important. Many similar calculations become obvious once you get the fundamental ideas clearly.1 It’s all just arithmetic.

Bayes’ Rule as religious icon

In pop Bayesianism, the Rule is evidently not arithmetic; it is the sacred symbol of Rationality.

In the video, Galef admits this almost immediately (0:35). Occasions in which you can actually apply the formula are rare. Instead, it’s a sort of holy metaphor, or religious talisman. You bow down to it to show your respect for Rationality and membership in the Bayesian religion.

The rest of the video goes on to say that Bayesianism boils down to “don’t be so sure of your beliefs; be less sure when you see contradictory evidence.”

Now that is just common sense. Why does anyone need to be told this? And how does the formula help?

I had thought that the message was something much more sophisticated. So I checked LessWrong, the main pop Bayesian web site. Its article “What is Bayesianism?↗︎︎” defines it as “a mindset that takes three core tenets fully into account”:

  1. Any given observation has many different possible causes.
  2. How we interpret any event, and the new information we get from anything, depends on information we already had.
  3. We can use the concept of probability to measure our subjective belief in something. Furthermore, we can apply the mathematical laws regarding probability to choosing between different beliefs. If we want our beliefs to be correct, we must do so.

Tenets 1 and 2 are obvious (I hope!), and pretty much what Galef said. Tenet 3 I agree with, except for the word “must.”2

The leaders of the movement presumably do understand probability. But I’m wondering whether they simply use Bayes’ formula to intimidate lesser minds into accepting “don’t be so sure of your beliefs.” (In which case, Bayesianism is not about↗︎︎ Bayes’ Rule, after all.)

I don’t think I’d approve of that. “Don’t be so sure” is a valuable lesson, but I’d rather teach it in a way people can understand, rather than by invoking a Holy Mystery.

Debunking Bayesianism

I had been thinking about writing a fairly sophisticated, technical explanation of where Bayesianism goes wrong. I’d like to point in a more productive direction.

I haven’t done that yet because actual Bayesianism is a bit technical. It’s a metaphysical interpretation of probability theory. It’s not really difficult, but a clear explanation would take some work.3

Galef is a prominent proponent of pop Bayesianism. My startledness at her video was realizing that none of what I was going to say is relevant. Evidently, the pop version is cruder than I thought. Evidently, I had been taking its allusions to advanced probability theory too seriously.4

Evidently, quite a different response is needed.

Does Bayesianism matter?

Maybe Bayesianism is like acupuncture. It has little practical value, and its elaborate theoretical framework is nonsense; but it’s mostly harmless, and it makes people feel better about themselves, so it’s good on balance. Also, it’s odd enough that few people are going to waste time and money on it. Some quack medical systems ought to be suppressed, but it’s probably best to leave acupuncture alone.

My worry, though, is that Bayesianism may have exactly the wrong effect: it makes people over-confident about their beliefs, because they think Sacred Mathematics justifies them. Empirically, pop Bayesians do often seem confident of things that seem highly unlikely to me.

On my Memetic Threat Assessment Scale, Bayesianism scores only 2/10, vs. 8/10 for “All Is One,”—a much more serious danger. So maybe I’m wasting your time by writing about it here.

My baffled fascination may be purely personal. I interact with many Bayesians on the net, and have come to love some of them. They tend to be smart, kind, unusual people. Bayesianism somehow appeals hugely to people who are like me in most ways. Yet it’s a near miss: my brain is not quite susceptible to infection with this meme.

Bayesianism as eternalism

Pop Bayesianism is a manifestation of non-theistic eternalism↗︎︎. The obvious eternalisms are explicitly religious, like Christianity. Non-theistic eternalisms are also common, but more insidious because they are less obvious. Bayesianism behaves like a religion in many ways, yet it is anti-supernatural.

Atheism and naturalism are a good start, but only the first steps in freeing yourself from eternalism. Beliefs about God are false, but factual wrongness is not the biggest problem with Christianity. It’s the eternalist emotional dynamics—and I see a lot of those in Bayesianism as well.

It’s important to understand that eternalism remains emotionally compelling even after you’ve rejected God. The hope that salvation is possible through Rationality is squarely eternalistic.

I may write more about that soon. What do you think? Would that be interesting?

  • 1. I suspect it is metaphysics that stops Bayesians from teaching probability in an understandable way. Gian-Carlo Rota, who taught probability at MIT when I was there, would frequently exclaim “It’s all just balls into boxes!” You can solve any probability problem easily if you look at it that way. This presentation is “frequentist,” though, which Bayesians reject on metaphysical grounds. I would suggest that, if you are committed to Bayesian metaphysics, it would still be best to teach “balls into boxes” first, because it makes the calculations easy. Then you can explain that frequentism is the root of all evil, and Bayesian metaphysics is the One True Way to salvation.
  • 2. The technical critique I mention below would explain why that is wrong.
  • 3. This explanation would not advocate frequentism as an alternative. I’m not interested in that metaphysical controversy. Rather, I’d argue that Bayes’ Rule is not usefully applicable in ways Bayesians want to believe it is.
  • 4. A chain of large belief-strength updates ensued!

How To Think Real Good

Thinking about thinking

This site concerns ways of thinking about some particularly important things: purpose, self, ethics, authority, and meaning, for instance. My aim is to point out common mistakes in thinking about those things, and how to do better.

I enjoy thinking about thinking. That’s one reason I spent a dozen years in artificial intelligence research. To make a computer think, you’d need to understand how you think. So AI research is a way of thinking about thinking that forces you to be specific. It calls your bluff if you think you understand thinking, but don’t.

I thought a lot about how to do AI. 1 In 1988, I put together “How to do research at the MIT AI Lab↗︎︎,” a guide for graduate students. Although I edited it, it was a collaboration of many people. There are now many similar guides, some of them better, but this was the first. Most of its advice was not specific to AI or MIT, and for many years after I got emails with thanks from researchers in all sorts of different fields.

Soon after, I realized that AI was a dead end, and left the field. Although my work in AI was influential, it seemed worthless in retrospect. I had a personal crisis: what should I do instead? The feedback on “How to do research” suggested that my thoughts about how to think would be useful more widely. And, I had worked in various fields besides AI, which had their own ways of thinking. My perspective was uncommonly broad.

Maybe the most useful thing I could do would be to write a book about how to think? I began. My jokey placeholder title was “How To Think Real Good.”2 I had a lot of ideas and some sketchy notes, but wound up abandoning the project.

LessWrong

This post was prompted by discussions↗︎︎ about Bayesianism and the LessWrong↗︎︎ rationalist community. “How To Do AI,” like LW, was a broad collaboration. “How To Think Real Good” would probably also have become a community effort. All three projects were about how to think, with an emphasis on technical methods.

My fascination and frustration with LW comes from my long-standing interest in the same general project, plus liking much of what LW does, plus disliking some of it, plus the sense that LW simply overlooks most of what goes into effective, accurate thinking. LW suggests (sometimes, not always) that Bayesian probability is the main tool for effective, accurate thinking. I think it is only a small part of what you need.

I’ve been making myself obnoxious↗︎︎ by griping about this, without explaining most of what my beef is. Several clarifying dialogues with LW community members have resulted. One question has come up repeatedly:

If not Bayesianism, then what?

The implicit assumption is that the problem Bayesianism solves is most of rationality, and if I’m unimpressed with Bayesianism, I must advocate some other solution to that problem. I do have technical doubts about Bayesianism, but that’s not my point. Rather, I think that the problem Bayesianism addresses is a small and easy one.

  • Bayesianism is a theory of probability.
  • Probability is only a small part of epistemology.
  • Probability is only a small part of rationality.
  • Probability is a solved problem. It’s easy. The remaining controversies in the field are arcane and rarely have any practical consequence.

My answer to “If not Bayesianism, then what?” is: all of human intellectual effort. Figuring out how things work, what’s true or false, what’s effective or useless, is “human complete.” In other words, it’s unboundedly difficult, and every human intellectual faculty must be brought to bear.3 We could call the study of that enterprise “epistemology”; and “rationality” is a collection of methods for it.4

Mostly, we have no idea how people figure things out. The answer is certainly not going to be some simple bit of math like Bayes’ Rule. We’re not going to get a complete story any time soon. What we can do—what I was hoping to do with “How to think real good”—is find heuristics; rules of thumb that often work in particular sorts of situations.

Like what?

In response to which, some LessWrong contributors rightly replied:

Like what? Be specific!

A proper answer would be a book (which would require suitable collaborators, and many more years of thinking about thinking with them).

What follows below is, I’m afraid, an off-the-cuff brain dump. I haven’t thought about “How to think real good” in 20 years, and have forgotten whatever I’d worked out then. [Update, years later: However, I have returned to the topic repeatedly—for instance in posts on meta-rationality.]

To be specific, I’ll tell some anecdotes about thinking. These concentrate on the application of formal methods of thought, mostly because that’s LW’s orientation. This is probably a wrong emphasis; most insights result from informal reasoning and observation, not technical rationality.

Understanding informal reasoning is probably more important than understanding technical methods.

That’s an anvilicious moral↗︎︎—an unsubtle take-away message. It’s rude to point these out so boldly, but I thought it might be useful to create a set of topics that a broader discussion of effective thinking could expand on. The list is totally unsystematic and certainly not exhaustive. Mostly I’ll provide no evidence or even explanation for these morals. And, they are probably annoyingly non-specific. Each one could expand into a book.

The anecdotes concern academic research, because that’s what “How to think real good” was going to be about. Nowadays, I’m more interested in the everyday understanding of non-academics. That’s the subject of Meaningness, and largely of LW too.

The anecdotes also concern research projects that I took part in, not because those are particularly good examples, but because they come easily to mind. We could do a better job by studying diverse examples of technical progress, but I don’t have time for that now.

Before the anecdotes, I’ll talk in general about problem formulation, because that’s an aspect of epistemology and rationality that I find particularly important, and that the Bayesian framework entirely ignores.

It happens that I’m not especially good at solving problems (at least, not as compared with other MIT PhDs). I’m unusually good at selecting and formulating them. So, I’m biased.

Problem formulation

Many of the heuristics I collected for “How to think real good” were about how to take an unstructured, vague problem domain and get it to the point where formal methods become applicable.

Formal methods all require a formal specification of the problem. For example, before you can apply Bayesian methods, you have to specify what all the hypotheses are, what sorts of events constitute “evidence,” how you can recognize one of those events, and (in a decision theoretic framework) what the possible actions are. Bayesianism takes these as given, and has nothing to say about how you choose them. Once you have chosen them, applying the Bayesian framework is trivial. (It’s just arithmetic, for godssakes!)

Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it.

A bewildered Bayesian might respond:

You should consider all hypotheses and types of evidence! Omitting some means you might get the wrong answer!

Unfortunately, there are too many. Suppose you want to understand the cause of manic depression. For every grain of sand in the universe, there is the hypothesis that this particular grain of sand is the sole cause of manic depression. Finding evidence to rule out each one individually is impractical.

But, obviously, all grains of sand are equivalent as far as manic depression is concerned! And anyway, sand obviously has nothing to do with manic depression.

Yes; but this is not logically necessary. It’s something we can reasonably suppose. But how do we do that? It requires intelligent background understanding.

This is something we have to do without explicit thought. We could consider and reject sand as a possible cause, but there is an infinite list of other logically possible causes. (Variations in the density of the letter “t” in Austrian government documents; chemical reactions that occur only above 873 kelvin; creatures that, at a distance, resemble flies↗︎︎, or are drawn with a very fine camel hair brush.) We can’t even imagine them all, much less evaluate the evidence for them.

So:

Before applying any technical method, you have to already have a pretty good idea of what the form of the answer will be.

Part of a “pretty good idea” is a vocabulary for describing relevant factors. Any situation can be described in infinitely many ways. For example, my thinking right now could be described as an elementary particle configuration, as molecules in motion, as neurons firing, as sentences, as part of a conversation, as primate signaling behavior, as a point in world intellectual history, and so on.

Choosing a good vocabulary, at the right level of description, is usually key to understanding.

A good vocabulary has to do two things. Let’s make them anvils:

1. A successful problem formulation has to make the distinctions that are used in the problem solution.

So it mustn’t categorize together things that are relevantly different. Trying to find an explanation of manic depression stated only in terms of emotions is unlikely to work, because emotions, though relevant, are “too big” as categories. “Sadness” is probably a complex phenomenon with many different aspects that get collapsed together in that word.

2. A successful problem formulation has to make the problem small enough that it’s easy to solve.

Trying to find an explanation of manic depression in terms of brain state vectors in which each element is the membrane potential of an individual neuron probably won’t work. That description is much too complicated. It makes billions of distinctions that are almost certainly irrelevant. It doesn’t collapse the state space enough; the categories are too small and therefore too numerous.

It’s important to understand that problem formulations are never right or wrong.

Truth does not apply to problem formulations; what matters is usefulness.

In fact,

All problem formulations are “false,” because they abstract away details of reality.

Any vocabulary pretends that the world is made of objectively separable “objects” (molecules, neurons, emotions, brains, conversations), with well-defined properties. But there are no objects in the real world.5

This is going to be a major point in Meaningness; I’ve just begun to discuss it here. Since I haven’t had time yet to explain, let me quote Richard Feynman instead:

Consider an object… What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about. Atoms are evaporating from it from time to time; dirt falls on it and gets dissolved in the paint; so to define a chair precisely, to say exactly which atoms are chair, and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, or which atoms are paint is impossible…

There are not any single, left-alone objects in the world—every object is a mixture of a lot of things, so we can deal with it only as a series of approximations and idealizations.

The trick is the idealizations. One may prefer a mathematical definition; but those can never work in the real world. A mathematical definition will be good for mathematics, in which all the logic can be followed out completely, but the physical world is [too] complex. When we try to isolate pieces of it, to talk about one mass, the wine and the glass, how can we know which is which, when one dissolves in the other?

A system of discourse about the real world must involve approximations of some kind. This is quite unlike the case of mathematics, in which everything can be defined.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics↗︎︎, Vol. 1: p. 12-2; some phrases omitted for concision.

Actually, I should probably just shut up and quote Feynman! His books are full of insights into thinking, and how formal methods work in practice.6

Anyway, the trick is the idealizations—the ways you simplify and abstract away from reality to create a conceptual framework within which you can work on the problem. There’s no such thing as a correct idealization; what you need is one that’s good for a particular job.

There’s an obvious difficulty here: if you don’t know the solution to a problem, how do you know whether your vocabulary makes the distinctions it needs? The answer is: you can’t be sure; but there are many heuristics that make finding a good formulation more likely. Here are two very general ones:

Work through several specific examples before trying to solve the general case. Looking at specific real-world details often gives an intuitive sense for what the relevant distinctions are.

Problem formulation and problem solution are mutually-recursive processes.

You need to go back and forth between trying to formulate the problem and trying to solve it. A “waterfall↗︎︎” approach, in which you take the formulation as set in stone and just try to solve it, is rarely effective.

The difficulty then is that you have to recognize incremental progress in both the formulation and the solution. It’s rare that you can use formal methods to evaluate that progress. So a planned major topic in “How to think real good” was informal, or intuitive, ways to evaluate progress.

Heuristics for evaluating progress are critical not only during problem solving, but also during problem formulation.

A highly general one:

Solve a simplified version of the problem first. If you can’t do even that, you’re in trouble.

A medium-specificity heuristic, applicable mainly in computer science:

If you are having a hard time, make sure you aren’t trying to solve an NP-complete problem. If you are, go back and look for additional sources of constraint in the real-world domain.

Rationality without probability

When I say “Bayesian methods are a tiny fraction of rationality,” somehow people don’t get it. So let’s look at an example, taken from my Master’s thesis↗︎︎.

I was interested in “classical planning,” a technical problem in robotics research. Let’s say you have a robot that can only do one thing at a time, and you want to get it to make several things true at once. The classic example is: suppose there are three children’s blocks sitting on a table: red, green, and blue. The robot can pick up one block at a time and put it on another block. You want a stack with the red block on the green block, and the green block on the blue block. That’s two things (red on green, green on blue) you want to be true simultaneously. The robot could put the red block on the green block, accomplishing the first condition, but then it would be stuck, because the green block has to go on the blue block, and it can only move one block.

Apparently, the robot has to plan ahead. It needs to figure out that it has to move the green block first. More generally, classical planning means finding an ordered sequence of actions that accomplish several goals at once. Once you’ve got that, you can execute the plan mindlessly, like running a program.

Before my Master’s work, dozens of researchers had tackled the problem, and built complex heuristic planning systems that no one understood well, and that didn’t always work. I produced a simple planning algorithm that I proved always worked (and so definitively solved the problem). This involved a year of agony and false starts and half-right attempts. It might be interesting to go back through my lab notebook of the time to analyze how I eventually succeeded.

However, part of the process is reflected in my solution, and I intend to draw some anvilicious morals from it. (This analysis is quite technical. You can skip ahead to the morals if you like.)

The algorithm constructs a plan incrementally as a partial order on actions. When it discovers a constraint on what has to happen before what, it adds an arc to the time-order digraph.

The key insight is a modal↗︎︎ extension of temporal logic to partial time orders. The “necessary” operator corresponds to a proposition holding in all totalizations of the partial order; “possibly” corresponds to a proposition holding in some totalization. The algorithm depends on a model theory↗︎︎ that makes it possible to compute possible and necessary truth in polynomial time.

Given this logic, proving that the planner is complete (it can always find a plan if there is one) and correct (its claimed plans always work) corresponds closely to demonstrating the completeness and soundness of a proof theory.

Morals?

You can never know enough mathematics.

I wasn’t smarter than the other people who worked on this problem. (Gerry Sussman↗︎︎’s PhD thesis was one of the major previous works.) I happened to have taken several advanced courses in mathematical logic (due to my interest in rationality), and it happened to be the case that the classical planning problem was easy once it was recast in logical terms. Probably none of the previous researchers in the field happened to have that background.

Put another way,

An education in math is a better preparation for a career in intellectual field X than an education in X.

I thought Paul Graham said that, but I can’t find it on his web site. The closest I can find↗︎︎ is:

Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.

[Update, three years later: I’ve found it! It was Gian-Carlo Rota↗︎︎: “When an undergraduate asks me whether he or she should major in mathematics rather than in another field that I will simply call X, my answer is the following: ‘If you major in mathematics, you can switch to X anytime you want to, but not the other way around’.”]

It was mostly dumb luck that modal logic and model theory turned out to be relevant to classical planning. If other people had realized they were relevant, they could have solved the problem years earlier. So:

You should learn as many different kinds of math as possible. It’s difficult to predict what sort will be relevant to a problem.

There are heuristics for guessing what formal methods will be relevant, though. I’ll mention some later.

Look, Ma, no Bayes!

Before moving on: observations about Bayesianism and rationality, at two levels.

First, the classical planning problem is definitely a problem of rationality. Putting the red block on the green block first is irrational; putting the green block on the blue block first is rational. This is a problem Bayes won’t help with at all.

My solution was also surely an example of formal rationality; mathematical logic is the standard for that. But it involves no probability theory of any sort.

At the meta level: the year of hard thinking I did to solve the classical planning problem involved huge uncertainties. Was a general solution even possible? What sort of approach would work? Was I on the right track, as I pursued various alternatives? But none of these uncertainties could usefully be modeled with probabilities, I think. The issues were way too amorphous for that.

At any rate, I certainly wasn’t aware of using probabilistic reasoning. It’s possible that I used it unconsciously.

I find it problematic, though, when Bayesians posit unconscious probabilistic reasoning as an explanation for rationality in cases where there is no evidence. This is dangerously close to “the God of the gaps”:

You have no other explanation for the Big Bang (consciousness, ethics, whatever), therefore God did it.

Likewise:

You don’t know quite how you solved that problem, therefore you used Bayes.

Reformulating rational action

My next example comes from work with Phil Agre, which led to both our PhD theses. Phil had an extraordinary series of insights into how effective action is possible (with some contributions from me).

In my Master’s thesis, I had proven that there can be no efficient solution to the classical planning problem. (Formally, it’s NP-complete.) Since people obviously do act rationally, this seemed a paradox.

One of Agre’s insights was that the problem formulation was wrong. That is, the classical planning problem is dissimilar to most actual situations in which people act rationally.

If a problem seems too hard, the formulation is probably wrong. Drop your formal problem statement, go back to reality, and observe what is going on.

Phil and I spent a couple years in careful observation, recording, and analysis of people actually doing things. From that, we developed an entirely different way of thinking about action↗︎︎—both what the problem is, and how to address it.

We applied as many different intellectual tools as we could find. In the end, ethnomethodology↗︎︎, an anthropological approach to describing action, was the single most useful. We also drew on (among others) Gibson’s perceptual psychology and Heidegger’s phenomenology of tool use. Each of these fields is highly “technical” in the sense of having elaborate, non-obvious methods, but none is “formal” in a mathematical sense.

Learn from fields very different from your own. They each have ways of thinking that can be useful at surprising times. Just learning to think like an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a philosopher will beneficially stretch your mind.

One key idea came from a cookbook. Fear of Cooking↗︎︎ emphasizes “the IRIFOY principle”: it’s right in front of you. You know what scrambled eggs are supposed to be like; you can see what is happening in the pan; so you know what you need to do next. You don’t need to make a detailed plan ahead of time.

IRIFOY doesn’t always work; sometimes you paint yourself in a corner if you don’t think ahead. But mostly that doesn’t happen; and Phil developed a deep theory of why it doesn’t. One aspect is: we can’t solve NP-complete problems, so we organize our lives (and our physical environments) so we don’t have to.

Dealing effectively with uncertainty without using probability

The classical formulation was unrealistically hard in some ways, but also artificially easy. It did not allow for any sort of uncertainty, for instance. We implemented a series of AI programs that were effective in complex, uncertain domains, where the planning approach failed. These domains involved both inherently random events and limited sensory access to relevant factors.

Our programs dealt competently with uncertainty despite not representing it at all. A Bayesian approach would have been overwhelmed by computational complexity; and belief probabilities wouldn’t have contributed to effective action anyway. This was the IRIFOY principle again: when our programs needed to make decisions, they could actively investigate to see what they needed to know. Most of the facts about their worlds were unknowable, but they could find out enough of what mattered, and ignored the rest.

It’s possible to attribute unconscious Bayesian reasoning to me, but definitely not to our programs. Anyone could look at the code and verify a total absence of probabilities.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like an anvil. If you only know one formal method of reasoning, you’ll try to apply it in places it doesn’t work.

Probability theory is sometimes an excellent way of dealing with uncertainty, but it’s not the only way, and sometimes it’s a terrible way. One reason is that it collapses together many different sources of uncertainty. For example:

  • inherent effective randomness, due to dynamical chaos↗︎︎
  • physical inaccessibility of relevant events
  • time-varying causes (so samples are drawn from different distributions)
  • sensing/measurement error/noise
  • model/abstraction approximations (as Feynman explained)
  • one's own cognitive/computational limitations

Each of these can be complex, and often they need to be dealt with in quite different ways. Summing them up in one number is unhelpful.

How far will that go?

The work Phil and I did was highly influential↗︎︎ for a while, and we could have turned that into tenured professorships at top universities. But we both walked away instead. We recognized that our approach could generate five or so years of further work, but would then fizzle out.

Evaluate the prospects for your field frequently. Be prepared to switch if it looks like it is approaching its inherent end-point.

One of Feynman’s books has a memorable letter to his wife, written from a cryogenics conference, in which he complains that the field is dying, and he’s bored stiff, but somehow the oblivious cryogenicists are still taking it seriously.7 I had this advice in mind when I left AI.

An AI model of problem formulation

Leslie Kaelbling↗︎︎, working with Stan Rosenschein, independently developed a theory of action similar to Agre’s and mine; and then independently recognized the same limitations we did. Around 1990, she and I hoped these limitations could be overcome using machine learning techniques, and we did many experiments on that, independently and in collaboration.

“Machine learning” is basically a collection of statistical techniques. As with other formal methods, they can work well when a problem is framed in terms that expose relevant features. They don’t work if your formalization of the problem is not good enough. That is fine if you view them as tools a scientist can use to help understand a problem; but our interest was in making minds, autonomous creatures that could figure out how to act effectively by themselves.

We considered a reinforcement learning↗︎︎ problem. A creature is thrown into a complicated world, and at times given a reward (cookies, or maybe utilons). Initially, it has no idea what conditions cause it to be rewarded, and no idea how to act to bring about those conditions. Through trial and error, can it learn to act effectively in order to maximize its utility?

The relevant framework was temporal difference methods↗︎︎. Those worked well if the experimenter abstracted the world into a handful of input values whose statistical relationship with reward was fairly obvious.

But what we wanted was for the creature to figure out the abstraction itself. We didn’t want to have to formulate the problem; we wanted our program to find its own formulation.

Most sensory information is irrelevant to a task, and should be ignored. (It’s noise, relative to action and reinforcement.) But which are the relevant inputs? Without knowing that, the then-best available method↗︎︎ would be instantly overwhelmed by the combinatorics of a realistically broad flow of sense data.

Our idea was that the creature could incrementally construct a formulation of the problem it faced by recognizing inputs that behaved statistically differently relative to action and reinforcement. Only those were relevant, and should be taken into consideration in figuring out an action policy.

With various refinements, this worked↗︎︎ on problems that previous methods couldn’t handle.

A little math goes a long way

When we did this research, neither of us knew much about statistics. In particular, we’d never heard of ↗︎︎, a basic statistical tool.

However, we did know enough about what statistics is about, and its vocabulary, that we could formulate one of our sub-problems statistically:

Given two sets of samples drawn from distributions D1 and D2, do we have enough data to know whether the two distributions are actually the same or different?

This was basically the test for whether a sensory input was relevant to action. And, having described it that way, it took half an hour of flipping through Leslie’s stats text together to find out that Student’s t was the tool for the job.

It’s more important to know what a branch of math is about than to know the details. You can look those up, if you realize that you need them.

Combined with the earlier moral that it’s good to know many kinds of math, this suggests:

Get a superficial understanding of as many kinds of math as possible. That can be enough that you will recognize when one applies, even if you don’t know how to use it.

Quite possibly the t-test was actually the “wrong” tool for the job. Someone who actually knows statistics might say “Oh, no! You should use Teacher’s u-test, because blah blah.” And they’d be “right”; that might work better, or be more “correct.” But the t-test solved the problem for us: the program worked.

Math only has to be “correct” enough to get the job done.

One reason for this is that there are often other, larger sources of error than mathematical details. Approximations are fine in engineering, and even in physics (as Feynman pointed out above). Mathematics never perfectly describes the real world.8 Quoting “How to do research”:

You should be able to prove theorems and you should harbor doubts about whether theorems prove anything.

Of course, it’s often good to go on to figure out the “right” answer; it might be important for other, related jobs. Or it might just be interesting for its own sake.

Surface thinking

After I decided that “strong” AI research (making minds) was going nowhere↗︎︎, and after the “what should I do with my life!?!” existential crisis, I figured I’d apply what I knew to something actually useful. Pharmaceutical drug discovery (finding new medicines) seemed the best bet.

Drugs work by fitting into slots in proteins. This is called the “lock and key” model: a particular protein slot has a very specific shape, and how well a molecule works depends on how nearly it fills the hole.9 If you know the shape of the slot, you can design molecules to fit. But often you don’t know. Instead, you have a collection of molecules that don’t fit very well, and some that don’t fit at all, and you want to find ones that fit better.

Actually making and testing new molecules is expensive—and the number of possible molecules is infinite. What you’d like is a statistical method that would take as input a set of molecules with known degrees of fit, and could predict how well a hypothetical new molecule would fit.

I worked on this problem in a team in the early ‘90s. Many of our conceptual advances were due to Ajay Jain↗︎︎, who is perhaps the best problem solver I’ve collaborated with. I learned a lot from him.

I’ve found that pretty smart people are all smart in pretty much the same way, but extremely smart people have unique cognitive styles, which are their special “edge.”

Try to figure out how people smarter than you think.

Figure out what your own cognitive style is. Embrace and develop it as your secret weapon; but try to learn and appreciate other styles as well.

What I observed about Ajay is that he always went for the simplest, most obvious, least interesting approach, and made it work. That is not my style at all; I’m addicted to “interesting” approaches. Those usually wind up as baroque failures. Maybe I’m less prone to that after watching Ajay cut through complexity.

There’s a quote I’d like to include here that goes something like this:

Every supposed genius has a bag of tricks—a list of obscure technical methods that hardly anyone knows about, that they have mastered. Every time they hear about a problem, they go through the list mentally, to see if one of the tricks might work. They hardly ever do, but once every year or two, you get a match, and then you look brilliant, like you’ve had some staggering insight. But actually all you did was notice that percolation theory↗︎︎ is applicable, or something.

(I thought Feynman said this, or maybe Gian-Carlo Rota, but I can’t find it.) Percolation theory was actually one of Danny Hillis↗︎︎’ tricks. I never saw him use it, but we used to compare our lists, and that one came up a couple of times. It stuck in my mind, and I’ve been hoping to find an application ever since.

Rota’s best trick was a method for solving a class of elliptic integrals that no one else could crack. These happened to come up a lot in hydrogen bomb design, so once every few months he’d fly to Los Alamos on a military jet and be locked in a room with some top-secret equations. He wasn’t allowed to take them away, of course, but he also refused to explain his method. He’d solve them entirely in his head and just write down the answers. He was paid well for this… I think I may have wandered off-topic.

Collect your bag of tricks.

Rota was the only professor I had who would actually explain how math works and how to do it. For some reason, mathematicians find that extremely embarrassing, like talking about their bowel movements or something, and they absolutely refuse to discuss it.

...Wait a minute! I’ve just found Rota’s “Ten lessons I wish I had been taught↗︎︎,” which includes the “bag of tricks” idea. It’s very funny, and has some good advice. (And it was Feynman, by the way! Except Feynman did it the other way around: keep a list of unsolved problems, and check them against any new technique you learn about.)

Find a teacher who is willing to go meta and explain how a field works, instead of lecturing you on its subject matter.10

So anyway, back to drugs. Medicinal chemists think about a molecule in terms of its connectivity graph: its atoms and covalent bonds. That is entirely irrelevant to whether or not it fits into a hole. So, naturally, medicinal chemists are bad at predicting whether a molecule will work, and that is one of many reasons that pharmaceutical research is unbelievably inefficient.

Computational chemists had developed predictive models that also depended on the connectivity graph, and naturally didn’t work either. This despite the fact that everyone knew that what actually matters is the 3D shape.

This is an example of problem formulation failure. Thinking about molecular fit in terms of connectivity was doomed from the outset, because that vocabulary does not capture the relevant distinctions (shapes), and makes a lot of irrelevant distinctions (graph topologies).

Part of the difficulty was that no one had a good idea about how to represent shape. One academic group had developed a prediction method based on shape, but it worked only barely better than the connectivity-based methods. It used a Cartesian occupancy grid to represent shape. In other words, it had a large number of voxels↗︎︎, checked each to see whether it was inside or outside the molecule, and used that as the input to the statistical method. This didn’t work well. If the grid was fine enough to discriminate shape accurately enough, the number of voxels was so large that it would cause statistical overfitting.

Ajay invented a much better shape representation, blindingly obvious in retrospect. (This was an instance of his trying the simplest thing first, and finding it worked.) It simply consisted of the distances from each of a set of fixed reference points to the nearest point on molecule’s surface.

One reason this worked (dramatically well, we showed↗︎︎) was that every measurement was directly relevant to what matters: the shape of the surface. In the voxel grid representation, nearly every measurement either tells you “this voxel is not part of the molecule” (in which case you don’t care) or “this voxel is somewhere inside the molecule” (but probably not on the surface, so again it doesn’t matter).

So this is another instance of the principle that a good problem formulation is one that exposes the information relevant to the solution, and eliminates information that is irrelevant and results in meaningless complexity.

Conclusions

Violating my main advice, this rambling brain dump included lots of irrelevant details (like how drugs work), and also failed to expose most of the key information you’d want (like interestingly specific heuristics for figuring stuff out).

In an attempt to salvage some value, let me try and make some of the main points again, concisely:

  • Figuring stuff out is way hard.
  • There is no general method.
  • Selecting and formulating problems is as important as solving them; these each require different cognitive skills.
  • Problem formulation (vocabulary selection) requires careful, non-formal observation of the real world.
  • A good problem formulation includes the relevant distinctions, and abstracts away irrelevant ones. This makes problem solution easy.
  • Little formal tricks (like Bayesian statistics) may be useful, but any one of them is only a tiny part of what you need.
  • Progress usually requires applying several methods. Learn as many different ones as possible.
  • Meta-level knowledge of how a field works—which methods to apply to which sorts of problems, and how and why—is critical (and harder to get).

If I had more time, I could do better. But, figuring out how to figure stuff out is even way harder. This is where the LessWrong internet collaborative approach shines brilliantly. It really needs to be a community effort.

Maybe we could start in the comment stream for this page?

How do you think about thinking? What heuristics have you found useful?

  • 1. That was thinking about thinking about thinking. “Anything you can do, I can do meta,” AI folks often say. But I can do it meta meta!
  • 2. My dissertation advisor wrote a book that got translated into Russian, and then translated back into English with the title “How To Hack Lisp Real Good↗︎︎”. He thought that was very funny and posted it on his office door.
  • 3. The analogy is with NP-completeness.
  • 4. Neither term is well-defined. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives two definitions for epistemology↗︎︎. The narrow definition is the study of “justified true belief”—an impoverished and unworkable↗︎︎ framework. The wide definition is “issues in the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.” “Rationality” is even less well defined, but often involves the use of formal, mathematical tools. This post is mostly about that.
  • 5. Not above the level of elementary particles, anyway.
  • 6. And he was the most important physicist of the mid-20th century, which makes him harder to argue with than me!
  • 7. I can’t find this on the web.
  • 8. A unified field theory would, but only at a level that is useless for nearly all practical purposes.
  • 9. And on charge distribution, and other factors; I’m simplifying this story because otherwise it will take forever, and you don’t care.
  • 10. This is why I am a student of Ngak’chang Rinpoche↗︎︎, who is the only Buddhist teacher I’ve met who can do that.

The New Age: appeal and limits

New Age FAIL

The New Age promised an Aquarian Revolution: a total, global transformation of consciousness. It has not delivered, as yet. I suspect, on the contrary, that the Age of Aquarius is drawing to an end.

The New Age was a response to particular historical circumstances that have passed. Understanding its appeal and limits may cast light on the emerging “pop spirituality,” which is similar in some ways and critically different in others.1

The New Age developed as an alternative to the restrictive, consensus 1950s world-view the Baby Boomers grew up in. In religion, the only 1950s choices were Christian and Jewish sects. In politics and economics, the only choices were capitalism and communism, which were seen as monolithic opposing ideologies. In society, the ideal was a nuclear two-parent heterosexual family with 2.3 children. Advances in science, technology, and industrial production made the idea of material Progress as an inevitable force compelling.2

Although some of these systems are superficially opposed, they all are forms of eternalist↗︎︎ dualism↗︎︎. “Eternalist” means that they see meaning as provided by an unchanging transcendent order. “Dualist” means that they uphold various hard-line distinctions. People are individuals clearly separated from each other; from nature; and from divinity. Definite choices must be made between competing systems, which must be either right or wrong. Social groups—classes, countries, races—are immutably different, and inherently conflicting.

Many in the Baby Boom generation rejected this consensus, and sought other systems. Mostly, the alternatives they found were forms of eternalist monism↗︎︎. These systems also see meaning as derived from a transcendent order (eternalism), but assert that the supposed separations of dualism are illusory (monism). Among dozens of other systems, astrology, parapsychology, eco-spirituality, quantum mysticism, and naturopathy—despite addressing quite different subjects—share this underlying philosophy. The phrase “New Age” was popularized as an umbrella term to cover them all. Despite the “New” in the name, these systems mainly developed in Nineteenth Century Europe, influenced by German Romantic Idealism.

These monist systems are based on accurate insights into the errors of dualism. None of the separations dualism imposes are absolute. Insisting that these lines cannot be crossed is a major source of misery.

Alternative models of healing were a major part of the New Age’s appeal. Mainstream medicine’s ideology is dualist nihilism↗︎︎. The body is a machine that sometimes needs adjustment; the mind is entirely separate from it and irrelevant to its function; spirit is non-existent. Conversely, dualist eternalism sees the body as inherently morally corrupt; something to be disciplined, neglected, or repudiated. Both approaches came to seem quite wrong.

The problem with the New Age

The problem with the New Age is that you have to believe and do stupid things. Mostly its specific systems are silly, if you take details seriously. This has limited its growth. Most people have little patience with crystal healing and angelic spirit guides from Atlantis. (Or whatever is happening in the FAIL photo↗︎︎ at the top of this page.3)

A few New Age adherents are seriously committed to a specific system. They spend years studying a complex, intellectually pretentious theoretical framework.

Most New Agers, though, hold to individual systems only lightly. They flit from one alternative healing method to another; they claim to believe in several incompatible religions at once; their actual lifestyles have little to do with their professed ideals.

For most New Agers, details are irrelevant. The specifics are, in fact, Nineteenth Century historical baggage.

For the client of a New Age healer, the mumbo-jumbo doesn’t matter. What is important is the healer’s recognition of the client as a whole person—body, mind, and spirit—who is also inseparably connected with all living beings. What qualifies the healer is not conceptual knowledge of astrological charts, maps of energy channels, or the pairwise interactions of flower essences. What qualifies the healer is her deep intuitive connection to the Cosmos as a whole.

Allegiance to the New Age is based on rejection of the only apparent alternatives: eternalist and nihilist dualism. If those are wrong, it may seem that monism must be right; and until recently, the New Age was the only available form of monism.

The sticking point is that it is not possible to participate in the New Age without adopting (however lightly or temporarily) one or more of the silly systems that make it up.

  • 1. What I write in this page is impressionistic, and unsupported by any specific evidence. This may be dangerously careless. On the other hand, I am not really interested in the New Age for its own sake. Instead, my goal here is to differentiate it from what I take to be its successor, what I am calling “contemporary pop spirituality,” about which I’ll say much more later.
  • 2. Of course, there were some people who rejected all these. However, they were a tiny marginal minority; whereas by 1990 alternatives had mass appeal.
  • 3. This is an internet joke meme: superimposing “FAIL” on images illustrating idiocy.

At the Mountains of Meaningness

Tree on Relay Peak, Nevada Sierra

Across centuries and continents, mountains are major sources of meaning—of inspiration and insight—for human beings. Why is that?

The color scheme of this web site—cobalt blue, dark green, and golden brown—was inspired by the tree in the photograph above. It stands on a desert mountain, ten thousand feet above sea level, within walking distance of my home. It is highly meaningful—to me.

I love mountains; I live and walk among them when I can.

I don’t know why mountains matter. Many reasons, maybe. This metablog post collects some observations and speculations.

The Mountain: a view from hell yes

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

I was inspired to write this by “The Mountain↗︎︎,” a recent post by Sarah Perry on her blog The View From Hell [Yes]: the search for patterns and the thickening of meaning. She thinks and writes, brilliantly, about many of the same topics I do.

She points out that among William James’ collection of others’ accounts of mystical experiences, many occurred in mountains. For instance:

I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life…. Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life.1

This was written by a Christian, but sounds quite Zen, or perhaps Taoist.2

The Great Image Has No Form

Landscape ink-painting by Kano Chikanobu, late 17th century

Will Buckingham, another of my favorite thinker-writers, has recommended and reflected on↗︎︎ a remarkable book: François Jullien’s The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting↗︎︎. It is about cloudiness, both as reality and metaphor for non-object-ness, expressed in Chinese painting and Chinese philosophy. It is:

about vagueness, about that which is indistinct, about the mist and fog that swirls through Chinese painting, about the mountains that simultaneously arise out of, and are dissolved into, the cloud.

Nebulosity (literally “cloudiness”) is the first concept of Meaningness. Second, my book examines the nebulosity of boundaries. Two confused stances↗︎︎ deny↗︎︎ that nebulosity: monism↗︎︎, which says “All Is One,” and dualism↗︎︎, which says that the world consists of clearly distinct objects.3 Meaningness then considers the nebulosity of the self/other boundary specifically. Two confused stances deny that nebulosity. True self hardens the self-other boundary, as in the dualist conception of the soul. Selflessness rejects the self as harmful, or rejects the distinction between self and other. Selfless attitudes are typical of ascetic philosophies, such as most traditional Buddhism↗︎︎.

Self and other are never either perfectly distinct nor perfectly unified; and so the self is not such a problem. Buckingham quotes Jullien:

The Zhuangzi↗︎︎ teaches us to de-occupy ourselves, but not because the “self” is detestable and we must flee it or ascetically deny it, but because we need to recover from the consistency of the subject, to rid ourselves of it and “forget” it, in the terms of the Zhuangzi… in such a way that we no longer have to posit the world as an object opposite us, to be known and manipulated.

Mystical mountaintop revelations often involve “a temporary loss of one’s own identity, accompanied by an illumination which reveals a deeper significance.” But that identity was never more than a “conventionality”; a taken-for-granted idea that does not accurately represent typical felt experience—if we bothered to check. Buckingham writes that

the deeply strange German philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, suggests that most of the time our experience is simply not that of being a subject, separated off from the world, confronting a world of objects that is opposite us. We only become a subject (“I”) looking at an object (“a tree”, perhaps) when somebody says “what are you up to?” and we say, “Oh, I’m looking at a tree…”

This is not a mountain-shaking mystical epiphany, no peak experience, but quite ordinary. That is a major theme in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time↗︎︎, a work that Buckingham, Perry, and I all cite as formative inspiration for our thinking.4

Heidegger’s example is a carpenter using a hammer.

We achieve our closest relationship with a hammer not by looking at it, or by some detached theoretical study of it, but by manipulating it. While engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, as independent objects, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them.

Moreover, not only is the hammer not part of the engaged carpenter’s world, neither is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes so absorbed in his activity that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. There are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).5

It is not that “the boundary between self and other breaks down”; it is that the distinction is irrelevant and useless here. So it is no more present than the boundary between Ohio and Kentucky, or between reptiles and amphibians.

Flow, on and off the path

Perry’s post describes running on specific mountain paths in Los Angeles. Of one, she writes:

I find it very difficult not to stick my arms out airplane-style on this part of the run, out of pure joy…. The descent begins gently, but quickly gets steep, so that maintaining a running pace requires full concentration, frequently producing the mental state known as “flow.” It is the most thrilling part of the run, resembling what I imagine to be the experience of steering a Star Wars air motorcycle through the forest.

Mountain running is, for me also, one of the most reliable ways to induce flow. It requires extended physical exertion, close proprioceptive attention to the workings of one’s own body and to the irregularity of the ground, rhythmic movement, and enjoyment of natural beauty. All contribute to the flow state, which is quite like Heidegger’s description of expert hammering. Flow is non-conceptual, but not a state of mindless automatism; rather, of heightened awareness.6

I’ve written about the connections between flow and Buddhist Tantric ritual↗︎︎:

“Flow” occurs when you are totally immersed in an activity that consumes your full attention and skill. It’s described by athletes as being “in the zone,” and by musicians as being “in the groove.” It’s highly enjoyable; often the best thing in life.

Flow is closely related to Buddhist Tantra; but there are important differences. These help explain the “path” aspect, or methods, of tantra.

Elsewhere↗︎︎, I wrote:

Spiritual paths are not much like the paths in a garden or city park. Instead, I want to compare them with hiking trails in remote, rugged mountains. The terrain of religious experience can sometimes be uncertain, difficult, or even dangerous, making this an apt analogy.

Being on a path can put you in the groove. I find mountain hiking most interesting when I’m off the path, though. This is also a valuable metaphor for more difficult explorations of meaningness. I’ve written about that here↗︎︎ and here↗︎︎. I’d like to say more now, but it would risk our getting lost…7

Vastness

Mountains are big. Bigger mountains are better; more meaningful.

The sky is big. It is bigger in the mountains. You can see, in the photo at the head of this page, how at ten thousand feet the thinner atmosphere makes the sky darker blue.

Experiencing vastness often transforms into an intense experience of religious meaningfulness. I do not know why. No one can say what the meaning is.

The emperor of China asked Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen: “What is the first principle of the holy truth?”8

Bodhidharma replied:

No holiness —

Vastness!

The emperor did not understand. So Bodhidharma wandered off into the mountains; and could not be found.

So I can see the sky

Sometimes, when asked why I meditate, I say: “so I can see the sky.”

I suspect many people rarely see the sky. Perhaps some people never have seen the sky.

When I don’t meditate, what I see—if anything—is “the sky,” not the sky. “The sky” is not interesting. The sky is vastly larger than “the sky.” It is too big to see unless I meditate.

Heidegger wrote:

The Sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year’s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether.

Stripping out his purple prose, this boils down to “there’s some weather and stuff up there.” Perhaps not a revelation? But maybe his point was: look at it!

There’s no point looking at “the sky”; all you’ll see is weather and stuff, and you’ve seen that a million times. If you look at the sky, you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.

… That’s not quite true. (I’ll explain why, later.) So let’s try again.

Sky and earth

Seeing the sky allows you also to see the earth.

The sky is above you; the earth is beneath you. You might not consider this news. It’s treated as a profound truth by several intriguing systems of meaning, however: Heidegger’s, Shambhala↗︎︎, Neopaganism, and Vico’s New Science↗︎︎—to name a few.

Vico regards the first men as beginning to think by becoming aware of the sky. They called the sky Jove, the first god. This awareness of the sky is the first distinction of thought. Through it a distinction of sky and earth can be made. Such a distinction allows the first men to live in a world.

Jove is not the name for the whole in the sense of all there is, everything. The thought of Jove allows not only the first men’s eyes to turn toward the sky for the first time, but also allows them to discover that they are of the earth.9

“Jove is not the name for the whole in the sense of all there is, everything.” That would be monism. It is because earth and sky are different that we live in a world—not in undifferentiated milky Oneness. We live on the earth, and are of the earth, not of the sky. Monism wrongly denies pattern↗︎︎—the inseparable consort of nebulosity.

Buckingham writes:

Fog hung over the lake. In the distance—it was impossible to say how far off—were the dark smudges of trees, appearing through the mist and disappearing again. I tried to trace the point at which the ripples of the water faded into the fog, the dividing line between one thing and another; but found all such attempts to draw boundaries came to nothing.

And yet, this was not some kind of notion of oneness along the lines of certain vacuous new-age ideas, because this itself is a notion that itself is far too clear, far too distinct.

Monism is an extreme view↗︎︎; the absolutist, hard-edged, aggressive denial of the obvious reality of differences. That is its appeal: it promises to annihilate all the troublesome, complicated details that make life difficult.

No reason for a mountain

Looking at mass-produced objects in artificial environments, you see mainly labels, concepts, functions, “conventionalities”; and this becomes a habit. Even walking in a city park, you see “trees.” They are there for a reason; they are legible↗︎︎, catalogued, rationalized, managed.

If you walk long enough on a mountain, the labeling habit—mainly useless there—falls away. The effort of running on a mountain accelerates that dissolution; you don’t have enough oxygen for both.

Then you do not see “a tree”; you see a tree.

It was seeing the specific tree pictured at the top of this page that led to my color scheme. There is nothing special about that tree. However, I saw it, not “a tree”; and that was meaningful at the time. It was, in fact, an experience of non-referential sacredness.

Buddhist, Hindu, Romantic, and New Age monisms cast concepts as the enemy. Intellectual distinctions—reasons, labels, conventionalities—are the source of all our trouble, they say. Murder your discursive mind and just perceive reality directly.

This springs from an important truth, but it is another simplistic, absolutist stance, and wrong for several reasons. One is that the boundary between concept and perception is itself nebulous. The no-thought school of mysticism implicitly asserts that concepts are themselves a clear and distinct category. It imagines that there is, at any moment, a fact-of-the-matter about whether or not you are applying a concept, and which one. And this is not true.

Do you see “a mountain”—a concept—or a mountain? These can be very different, but not always. We might say that this difference is a matter of degree, not kind; or that it is sometimes indistinct, like the non-boundary between the lake and the fog. (Which is why what I said about seeing and not-seeing the sky is not quite true.)

Buckingham continues:

It was rather a question, as I stood by the lake, of a kind of de-occupying, de-positing, de-representing… It was a matter, that is to say—in this sketched world of blur and indistinct boundaries—of becoming sketchy myself.

The operation of one’s self, the machinery of perception, the application of concepts—these too are a borderless interplay of pattern and nebulosity. As Jullien said, “we need to recover from the consistency of the subject”—the idealized and impossible coherence of the self.

Overturning form and emptiness

Japanese sumi-e ink painting: mountain above, sky below

When you stand high on a steep mountain slope, looking out over the gulf, you see vast space beneath you; turning, you see vast earth above you. This inversion induces vertigo, which stops the mind.

The Chinese landscape painting tradition that Jullien describes accomplishes the same overturning by girdling mountains’ midparts in modesty: clouds below, rocks above.

In Zen it is said: “First there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; and then there is a mountain.” The mountain is form; no-mountain is emptiness. The mountain after no-mountain is the same mountain, and not the same. (I wrote about this at length in “Beyond emptiness: Zen, Tantra, and Dzogchen↗︎︎.”)

The sky, symbolically, is emptiness. We are form; we are of earth; but in non-ordinary experience, we can upset the two and become the sky.

Dwelling in the sky is probably not possible↗︎︎, and certainly not useful. There’s nothing to do up there. We return to form; but we are not the same, because earth remains mixed with sky. Mixed not (pace certain Tibetan texts) like water and milk. Form and emptiness, rather, bleed into each other, irregularly, like the margins of mountain and sky in a sumi-e inkwash painting.

Mountains without clouds

Clouds in mountains are a misleading metaphor, though. Clouds are adventitious and contingent.

The metaphor suggests a limitation of epistemic access: that we cannot see the mountains properly because clouds are in the way.10 However, a sunny day can burn away the fog. Even if clouds were always present, the invisible reality of the mountain remains.

Nebulosity, in the sense of Meaningness, is an ontological fact, not an epistemic one. The point is not that we cannot find boundaries, but that they are not objectively determined.

The mountains in the photograph at the top of this page are in a high-altitude desert. Trees and rocks stand out in the sun, brilliant and sharp-edged. It is hard to miss their specificity and uniqueness. Are we seeing them shorn of nebulosity? Not at all.

If you think of a rock now, reading this, what comes to mind is probably a not a rock, but a concept of a rock. Your image may be of a domesticated rock; perhaps even an indoor rock. Tame rocks are tidy and well-defined. They have clear and distinct surfaces; boundaries. Usually they are taken from rivers or beaches; they are water-polished.

The wild rocks high on mountainsides are not there for any reason. They just are; and so you can see them.

Granodiorite

Granodiorite image courtesy↗︎︎ Rudolf Pohl

The rocks beneath my tree are granodiorite: an unusually hard mineral, similar to granite, formed under vast pressure many miles underground. If you pick one up and look closely, you will see that many surface irregularities are loose. Some bits, little larger than dust, come off just if you blow gently on them. Some grains you can rub off with your thumb; some flakes you can pry off with a fingernail. Which are “part of the rock” and which are “adhering bits of dirt”? There is no answer to this question. There is no fact-of-the-matter about where the rock ends and its matrix of soil begins. The sharp-edgedness of a desert rock is limited, when you actually look. Even rocks are nebulous.

Mountains are exceptionally real

Nebulosity is not a state of incomplete existence. Metaphysicists have often confused themselves about this. Rocks are nebulous, but unusually real.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley↗︎︎’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal↗︎︎. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it —“I refute it thus.”11

Throughout life, every experience, moment-to-moment, is accompanied by a constant undertone of “how real this is.” (I do not know why.) Everyday life is mostly modestly real. Sometimes, when depressed, it seems unreal↗︎︎. Sometimes, at peak moments, life seems exceptionally real.

The desert mountain is silent, but it is not the quiet of peace. It is the silence of coruscating energy, like a wound spring; like a gigantic electric guitar chord that is overwhelming yet inaudible.

The vastness, precision, specificity, and energy of the mountain induces a sense of intense realness, which creates great meaningfulness.

  • 1. Anonymous source quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience↗︎︎. Emphasis added by me.
  • 2. Direct influence is possible. Buddhism was fashionable and widely-professed among hip American intellectuals in the 1890s (an interestingly little-known fact). James published in 1902, and described this informant only as “a man aged twenty-seven.” But then, direct influence in the opposite direction is also possible. This account sounds even more Romantic than it does Christian or Zen; and what we now know as “Zen” extensively incorporates↗︎︎ European Romantic themes. The image at the head of this section, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, is famous as a paradigm of Romanticism. I suspect the account quoted by James may have been influenced by the painting.
  • 3. One of the most important debunkings of monism is William James’ “The One and the Many↗︎︎” in his Pragmatism↗︎︎.
  • 4. I don’t know whether Rosenzweig influenced Heidegger. I do know that Heidegger and 20th century Zen did both influence each other.
  • 5. This is a paraphrase of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Heidegger↗︎︎. Being and Time is virtually unreadable. The Stanford Encyclopedia is not all that readable, either, so I’ve edited it for concision and clarity.
  • 6. As the Stanford Encyclopedia article puts it: “Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein’s behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in form.”
  • 7. One of Heidegger’s major works is titled Off the Beaten Track↗︎︎. Like me, he did most of his thinking while hiking, and “path” was a complex and productive metaphor for him too.
  • 8. I’ve written about this story before↗︎︎.
  • 9. Quote lightly paraphrased from Donald Phillip Verene’s Vico’s Science of Imagination↗︎︎, p. 84.
  • 10. This might be interpreted in terms of Kant’s thing-in-itself, or the masking of reality by conceptual categories. Both these are unconnected (I hope) with “nebulosity” as I use the term.
  • 11. A famous passage from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson↗︎︎.

Tribal, systematic, and fluid political understanding

You may possibly have noticed that politics is afflicted with irrational emotionalism, culture wars over meaningless symbols, and insane hostility between mutually-incomprehending tribes.

You may also have noticed that many who try to develop a more sophisticated and principled political stance often wind up arguing that some implausible system like communism or anarcho-capitalism would solve all the world’s problems.

You may have been tempted to reject politics altogether, as it seems a battle between blithering berserk baboons.

Here I aim to diagnose these three ailments, and to offer remedies. I draw on two conceptual frameworks: the Meaningness analysis of eternalism↗︎︎, nihilism↗︎︎, and the complete stance↗︎︎; and the adult developmental theory↗︎︎ of Robert Kegan.

I’ll explain those shortly, but before diving in, a quick summary—which may make sense only for readers who are already familiar with both ways of thinking.

Much of the appeal of politics nowadays is as a prolific source of definite meanings, in an era in which those seem scarce. Eternalism hallucinates meaning where there is none. Contemporary politics, afflicted with eternalism, is overloaded with irrelevant and illusory meanings.

Following Kegan’s scheme, eternalism in politics can be divided into tribal↗︎︎ and systematic↗︎︎ forms. These are stages 3 and 4 in his developmental framework. They correspond to the first two paragraphs at the top of this page. The third paragraph expresses nihilistic rejection of politics, which is typical of stage 4.5. The complete stance avoids the errors of both eternalism and nihilism. It relates to stage 5; and in the social realm, it manifests as the fluid mode↗︎︎.

I discuss these in turn below, along with suggestions for how we can move beyond unproductive tribal and systematic political conflicts.

First, a discussion of the psychology of political commitment. (If you have followed my previous writing closely, this will mostly be familiar, so you may want skim, or skip over it.)

The bases of political cognition

The “standard theory” of democratic politics goes something like this.1 Political ideologies are coherent systems↗︎︎ of beliefs about government, based on fundamental moral principles. Everyone commits to one ideology, and its beliefs, based on its principles aligning with their moral values. The ideologies contradict each other’s beliefs, and so people fight about which beliefs are correct. They organize political parties to champion their ideology. From an ideology’s principles, you can figure out what your position on specific policy issues should be.2

This is mostly wrong.

  • Most people have only a vague understanding of political ideology, and don’t care much about it. They don’t care about ideology because they don’t actually care about government, or about policy.
  • To the extent that voters care about government, they mostly just want it to act to benefit people like themselves.
  • People do care about politics—but current politics is mostly not about government. It is about tribal identity and personal status.
  • Politics is a domain of meaning. We think about meaning mainly in terms of very simple, emotional stances↗︎︎, rather than complex conceptual systems such as political ideologies.

Most voters actively don’t-care about government policy

Surveys consistently show that voters are astonishingly ignorant of basic facts about how their system of government is organized, about current policy questions, and about the policy positions of candidates and parties. For example:

Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.3

And similarly:

The most commonly known fact about George H. W. Bush’s opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli. During the 1992 presidential campaign, 86 percent of the public knew that the Bushes’ dog was named Millie, yet only 15 percent knew that both presidential candidates supported the death penalty. Judge Wapner, host of the reality-TV series “The People’s Court,” was identified by more people than were Chief Justices Burger or Rehnquist. More people knew who John Lennon was than Karl Marx, and Bill Cosby than either of their U.S. Senators.4

This might lead to the depressing conclusion that voters are extraordinarily stupid. That would be a mistake, though. The reason people don’t know about government is that they don’t care about it. It is boring, and they believe they shouldn’t have to care about it. It should just work, delivered as a reliable public service like electricity. No one knows how electricity works, because there’s no reason to bother.

Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work↗︎︎ finds that:

Contrary to the prevailing view that people want greater involvement in politics, most citizens do not care about most policies and therefore are content to turn over decision-making authority to someone else. People’s wish for the political system is that decision makers be empathetic and, especially, non-self-interested, not that they be responsive and accountable to the people’s largely nonexistent policy preferences or, even worse, that the people be obligated to participate directly in decision making.5

Most people vote for their perceived tribal interests

As I discussed in my page on the culture war, political scientists Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban found that differing pragmatic interests explain Americans’ political opinions better than differing ideological or moral “values.” (They summarize this research in The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It↗︎︎.) Ideology dresses up naked self-interest in modest, morally attractive and conceptually elegant outfits. Everyone advocates policies that would favor people like themselves—often at the expense of many or most other people—and then rationalize their views in terms of high-sounding universal principles. This is largely unconscious.6

In a representative democracy, you vote for candidates, not policies. Most people choose a candidate who seems to be from their tribe, or at least empathizes with their tribe, and who will therefore use government to promote the interests of the tribe. They don’t want to have to know how he or she will go about doing that.

To the extent that they keep track of policy issues, they select a handful that are litmus tests for “will this person advance the interests of my tribe?” Those particular policies need not particularly benefit the tribe; the issues they address might be entirely symbolic. They only need to be a reliable indicator of tribal affiliation.

Stances trump systems

Although most people don’t care much about policy, they do care passionately about politics. For many, politics serves as a main source of meaning in life—like religion, ethics, or psychology.

Stances↗︎︎, not conceptual systems, are the main way we deal with questions of meaning. Stances are simple, compelling patterns of thinking and feeling. They are much less elaborate than ideologies—and much more powerful in practice.

This page analyzes political cognition in terms of two confused stances↗︎︎, eternalism and nihilism. Both are responses to nebulosity↗︎︎: the unstable, uncertain, fluid, complex, and ill-defined nature of all meanings. Genuine policy issues are mainly highly nebulous in this sense. Culture war “values” issues are also exceptionally nebulous. This lack of solid ground makes it difficult to know what social structure or political system would be better than others.

Eternalism↗︎︎ just fixates↗︎︎ meaning for everything—simply denying↗︎︎ all uncertainty. It promises to nail meanings in place so they will behave themselves—but it cannot deliver. Nevertheless, both tribal and systematic political thinking are highly eternalistic.

Nihilism↗︎︎, the mirror image of eternalism, denies all meaning. For centrists, and anyone else who is sick and tired of the culture war, entirely denying its meaning is tempting—but, I will suggest below, mistaken.

Many other confused stances play important, detrimental roles in politics. I have suggested that the current culture war is organized around monism↗︎︎ and dualism↗︎︎. Both sides in that conflict frequently also deploy mission↗︎︎, romantic rebellion↗︎︎, victim-think↗︎︎, and religiosity↗︎︎—all confused stances on particular dimensions of meaning.7

Complete stances↗︎︎ neither fixate nor deny meanings. They recognize nebulosity, and also pattern: that meanings are, to varying extents, also reliable, distinct, enduring, clear, and definite. In “Completing the countercultures,” I explained how this recognition could, in principle at least, dissolve the monism-vs.-dualism political dynamic.

This page applies the same method to eternalism and nihilism. Dropping those might eliminate much political confusion, and along with it much unnecessary political conflict.

This is not a plea for centrism, compromise, civility, or well-meaning tolerance. (I tend to favor those, but that is not the point here.) Political conflict cannot be ended by “finding the truth somewhere in-between.” Partly that’s because it involves conflicts of pragmatic interest; income redistribution benefits some and harms others, and no analysis in terms of meanings or values can change that. But also because both sides are afflicted by the same confused stances. The truth is not in-between; it’s somewhere entirely different: in a complete stance.

Stages of emotional, cognitive, and moral development

Kegan describes three stages of adult development↗︎︎, numbered 3, 4, and 5. We could call them tribal (stage 3), systematic (stage 4), and fluid (stage 5). Each is a complete, consistent way of being, with a characteristic way of approaching relationships, the nature of one’s self, the way one thinks in general, and ethical thinking in particular. Below, I apply this scheme to political thinking.8

These stages are not ideologies, or sets of values. They have no content; they are about form. They are ways one thinks and feels, not what one thinks and feels.

The stages are not alternatives that different people adopt according to innate preferences, or due to family or peer-group influence. They are necessarily-sequential steps in personal growth. People who are at a particular stage cannot think or feel in the ways characteristic of later stages. They actually cannot understand explanations given in a later stage’s framework. (And, they mostly cannot understand that they do not understand them.) On the other hand, anyone at a later stage can accurately describe how someone at an earlier stage would think about an issue.

Stage 3 is about identifying with one’s community↗︎︎. What is good for the tribe is good, period. (This is an eternalistic statement.)

Communal ethics seek harmony within a homogeneous social group. That is maintained by empathically monitoring others’ needs and aligning your intentions toward them. You should obey community taboos and shibboleths, even when they are unjustified and senseless. Violating them upsets people, which is not nice. Living up to what other members expect from you to is good by definition.

For stage 3, conflict within the tribe is anathema, but hostility to outsiders is heroic—because they reject the sacred myths of the tribe, which violates harmony.

Stage 4 is about systems↗︎︎. In political terms, it is ideological, whereas stage 3 hasn’t yet developed the cognitive capacity to evaluate ideological claims. It understands formal structures, principles, and roles. It operates competently in a rule-driven social organization, such as a corporation or governmental body. These are full of asymmetrical, artificial relationships with specific responsibilities. (A tribal community, by contrast, recognizes only conventional family roles; plus one’s loose, unbounded, reciprocal responsibility to support the collective, and right to be supported by it.) For stage 4, a system is ethical if it treats people impartially: based on rights, responsibilities, principles, and procedures, not personal relationships.

Stage 4 takes one system as correct. It sees principles as absolute truths. If two systems conflict, one must be wrong. That makes it, too, an eternalistic view.

Development beyond stage 4 is driven by seeing contradictions within and between systems. At some point you realize that all principles are somewhat arbitrary or relative. There is no ultimately true foundation on which a correct system can be built. It’s not just that we don’t yet know what the absolute truth is; it is that there cannot be one.

This uncomfortable midpoint of the stage 4 to 5 transition is “stage 4.5↗︎︎.” It’s common here to commit↗︎︎ to explicit nihilism. Understanding that there is no ultimate meaning, one comes to the wrong conclusion that there are no meanings at all.

Eventually, you notice that meanings continue to operate quite well despite their lack of ultimate foundations. Systems re-emerge as transparent forms. You no longer see by means of systems, but can see through systems as fluid constructions that most people mis-take as solid. Stage 5 is meta-systematic↗︎︎: it can hold contradictions between systems comfortably while respecting the specific functioning and justification-structure of each. It relativizes all ideologies as tools rather than truths.

Stage 5 commits to the complete stance: it recognizes both the nebulosity and the patterns of systems, and so avoids both eternalism and nihilism.

Deflating tribal drama

For stage 3 tribal participants, political conflict is an endless fount of meaning. It offers simple, dramatic narratives, colorful characters, nail-biting battles of Good and Evil, and exciting opportunities for personal heroism and tribal solidarity. These fairy stories and soap operas appear highly meaningful, but are superimposed, with little basis in reality.

Football, Hollywood celebrities’ love lives, and politics are interchangeable entertainments for many. The appeal of sports and gossip also lies in fictional, superimposed dramas of emotional, relational, tribal conflict. That is benign; not so for politics, unfortunately.

Curiosity and realism

Moving from eternalism to the complete stance starts by deflating imaginary dramas and stripping away fake meanings. Political conflict is inevitable, but inter-tribal demonization is not. Culture warring over symbols is not.

Politics minus eternalism leaves practical conflicts, which are inevitable, because people are diverse. However, practical solutions are usually possible—after dissolving eternalist absolutisms, which make compromise look morally wrong.

Minus overlaid meanings, reality looks dull, seen from the eternalistic standpoint. From a distance, the complete stance seems boring, because it is obviously right; and unappealing, because it doesn’t make attractive (but false) promises, like confused stances do. It does not offer The Ultimate Answer To Everything↗︎︎. It only removes obstacles to seeing meanings accurately.

Politics should look dull to eternalists. Its legitimate function is to make decisions about policy issues, like highway maintenance, bank regulation, and cybersecurity. These are severely boring topics—unless you have the curiosity to dive into their intricate details. (Then they become fascinating—of their own accord, without imaginary dramas added.)

Open-ended curiosity is an antidote to both eternalism and nihilism, and a key aspect of the complete stance. When it comes to highway maintenance, bank regulation, and cybersecurity, most people aren’t curious; and there is no reason they should be. But that does imply they shouldn’t be interested in politics.

“Closed-ended” curiosity means seeking the answer to a specific question, within a particular framework. That is characteristic of stage 4 systematic eternalism. Open-ended curiosity requires active enjoyment of nebulosity. It has no beef with meaninglessness, bafflement, and un-knowing. That generosity allows meaning to emerge spontaneously, instead of imposing it. How often in a political discussion do you hear “I don’t know; this is puzzling”? Mostly I hear “That just proves that the correct answer is…!”

Realism is another antidote to both eternalism and nihilism. “Boring” policy topics particularly demand it. Speculative fantasies about cybersecurity are running rife at the moment, and are spectacularly unhelpful.

Everyone feels qualified to have political opinions without knowing anything about policy issues. Everyone feels justified in fighting the culture war without understanding its basis or function. This is stupid, harmful, and morally wrong, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, it is actively encouraged by popular morality in Western democracies. “You ought to develop an informed opinion about political issues so you can participate effectively in democracy” was a powerfully correct social norm at one time. “Informed” meant understanding the policy issues. That part of the norm has fallen away. Perhaps increasing social, economic, and technological complexity has made that inevitable. It was feasible for voters to understand most policy issues back in the systematic era↗︎︎; it is not now. “Informed” opinion, if the adjective is remembered at all, means you can regurgitate a soundbite or factoid you saw on the news last night. It rarely involves structural understanding.

Restoring alternative sources of meaning

The countercultures merged religion, ethics, and politics. That reduced all three to vague, homogenous, weaksauce pablum. Each of these distinct domains of meaning lost its specificity and its bite. That is comfortable—and it was by offering comfort that the countercultures could create mass movements.

But it has also left a vacuum of meaningfulness. So, layers of fictional meaning got added to politics in order to make it do the work ethics and religion used to. The slogans “social justice” and “family values” were pressed into service as ill-suited and inadequate substitutes for morality and religion. Nearly everyone agrees that society should be just, and should honor and support families. Almost no one is against either, which makes them meaningless if taken at face value. As political slogans, they act instead as applause lights↗︎︎ for the whole of the left and right political agendas, respectively.

It is hard to let go of imaginary meanings without better alternatives. Restoring religion and ethics to their proper roles as distinctive sources of value would help. (It would be the right thing for their own sakes as well!)

In the case of religion, both countercultures merged many dissimilar traditions into the two generic New Age and Christian Conservative brands, neither of which had much content. (Buddhism, which happens to be my religion, got caught up in this↗︎︎, and was reduced to↗︎︎ “it’s nice to be nice.”)

I would like religious leaders to proclaim, once again, that different religions, denominations, and sects are importantly different. That doesn’t have to imply sectarian conflict—“different” doesn’t mean “ours is the Only True Way”—but even that might be better than “all religions teach the same truth.” And, in a country that guarantees religious freedom, sectarian animosity would be preferable to the political culture war.

Kegan was particularly concerned with ethics. He observed that adult cognitive development in general, and ethical development in particular, requires social and cultural support. The transition from stage 3 to stage 4 ethics is difficult to accomplish solo. Joining a well-functioning social system that demonstrates systematic ethics in action is hugely helpful. Unfortunately, Western societies have allowed this “bridge” to fall into disrepair, making getting to stage 4 is harder than it should be. Repairing the bridge would be a major step toward defusing the tribal culture war.

It would also help to reinforce additional sources of meaning that have been particularly undercut by atomization↗︎︎: artistic creativity; a realistic understanding of selfness and its developmental transitions; and—most of all—community. This is exactly the project of the fluid mode↗︎︎, in its aspect of addressing the defects of atomization.

Many political scientists have suggested, uneasily, that people who don’t understand politics shouldn’t be allowed↗︎︎ to vote. The logic of this is inescapable, but there are strong obvious objections to putting it into practice—even in principle. My next post will suggest a way to keep politically uninformed, cognitively tribal people from affecting policy decisions, without depriving them of a vote.

Looking beyond political systems

A more sophisticated understanding of politics concerns systems: institutions, principles, and rule-governed procedures. Eternalism at stage 4 is the stance that there are ultimately↗︎︎ correct institutions, principles, and rules. Its fantasy is that there must be some cosmically true system of government, and if only we adopted it, it would solve most social problems.

The 1960s-80s countercultures were originally systematic. However, it is hard to hold systems together without the glue of rationality, which both countercultures rejected. They tried to find alternative adhesives, and mostly failed. As a result, the culture war that is their legacy is mainly symbolic, mythic, and emotive; i.e., tribal.

Anyway, we’re now living in the atomized era. That has not only dissolved all coherence, it renders the countercultures senseless because they are archaic relics left over from two modes back. Their waterlogged wrecks are breaking up and sinking into the contemporary sea of atomized meanings.

For those who have a systematic worldview↗︎︎, a main appeal of culture warring is that political ideology is a source of coherent, structured meanings, which are socially validated as important. In the atomized era, conceptual coherence has become precious and scarce, outside of technical disciplines.

For non-technical people making the 3-to-4 transition, by gradually developing the ability to think systematically, working through the logic of a political ideology can be a lifeline of meaningfulness. Testing one’s arguments in debate is a training ground for rational thought. One can be proud of rising above the meaningless chaotic noise of tribal political discord, and of gaining a seeming understanding of how the world really works, and how society really should be organized.

Unfortunately, although it is more sophisticated, systematic political eternalism is as mistaken as the tribal version. Two reasons: there is no correct political system, and political reasoning from first principles doesn’t work.

There is no correct political system

Arguing about which tidy, rational system is correct—in the abstract—is nearly as irrelevant and counterproductive as arguing about which tribe is correct. Politics doesn’t run on tidy rational systems. And never did—despite the pretensions of the systematic era—and never could. (I’ll explain why briefly below, and in more detail later in the book.)

Systematic, “rational” reasoning about political structures usually ends up in a simplistic, totalizing vision that is logically elegant but ignores obvious practicalities, and which would be a disaster if implemented. Communism, anarchism, and idealized laissez-faire capitalism are typical examples. These systems are also all highly moralistic (whereas the fluid mode recognizes the nebulosity of ethics, and its only-partial coupling with politics, and so can be more pragmatic).

Geeky details of government structure can be important, and structural tinkering may be worthwhile. However, the idea that wholesale replacement with idealized first-principles alternatives would solve most problems is a fantasy. It proved catastrophic in many countries during the twentieth century.

Political reasoning from first principles doesn’t work

Deductive reasoning is typical of stage 4 political thinking. “This principle implies that such-and-such a policy would have that outcome, which would be morally right; therefore it is the correct policy.”

The appeal of deductive reasoning is the promise of certainty. If you have found the right political system, and you follow valid rules of logic, you will know for sure what the correct policies are. Also, your position will be unassailable, and you can win all political arguments (so long as your opponents are even vaguely rational). Unfortunately, this is completely delusional.

Reasoning from first principles usually obscures the relevant issues in pragmatic policy problems. Those are typically nebulous: hideously complex, replete with messy practical specifics, and dependent on constantly-changing circumstances. Their effects are highly uncertain ahead of time, difficult to identify after the fact, and of ambiguous value since they benefit some people and hurt others. Deductive logic—which proceeds from clear-cut certainty to clear-cut certainty—fails in the face of such nebulosity.9

Further, in political conflicts, fundamental principles are usually multiple and disagree. If there was only one, or they all pointed in same direction, one policy would be obviously the right thing and people would just do it and there would be no controversy. Stage 4 reasoning has limited resources for dealing with conflicting principles. (Stage 5 has more. Relatedly, stage 5 recognizes, as neither 3 nor 4 consistently does, that your political opponents are not motivated by uncommon malice or stupidity.)

Most policy issues must be addressed empirically, not deductively. Would a Basic Guaranteed Income scheme lead to greater or lesser employment? Would legalizing heroin lead to an increase or decrease in fatal overdoses? Will legalizing gay marriage be good or bad for children of same-sex couples? There is no way to reason these questions out. The only way to get answers is to do experiments and see what happens.

Systematic people are often nearly as ignorant about policy issues as tribal ones are—but for a completely different reason. Tribal people simply find government uninteresting. Systematic people choose ignorance because facts—and especially uncertain facts—wreck first-principles reasoning, and frequently contradict simplistic implications of eternalistic systems.

Michael Huemer, recommending that most people stay out of politics↗︎︎, writes:

It seems to me that most people who expend a great deal of effort promoting political causes expend very little effort attempting to make sure their beliefs are correct. They tend to hold very strong beliefs that they are very reluctant to reconsider. When presented with new information conflicting with their existing beliefs, these individuals are much more likely to react with anger, as one under attack, than with gratitude…. The evidence thus suggests that politically committed people are motivated more by a desire for a sense of promoting political ideals than by a desire for those ideals themselves.

Productive political debate argues concrete practicalities, not systems or values. In “The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People↗︎︎,” which points toward a stage 5 understanding of politics, David Blankenhorn recommends—among other excellent advice—doubting your convictions, and sticking to specifics.

Because generalization is both an ally and a frequent indicator of polarization, highly depolarizing people tend to be connoisseurs of the specific. This dedication to specificity can express itself in at least four important ways. The first is a persistent skepticism about categories. The second is to consider each issue separately and on its own terms, as opposed to assuming the validity of a governing ideological framework, such as “conservatism” or “liberalism.” The third shifts the argument away from abstract, often philosophically charged questions, toward specific empirical ones. The fourth is to rely on inductive reasoning, which tries to build conclusions from the bottom up by accumulating specific data points, over deductive reasoning, which tries to build conclusions from the top down by exploring the implications of true general premises or statements.10

The modal muddle

In terms of Kegan’s stages, the largest group of Western adults are somewhere in the 3-to-4 transition. They have some capacity for rule-governed, systematic rationality, but cannot apply it reliably or in all domains.

Most people’s political arguments display a muddled mixture of tribal loyalty and systematic ideology. Their grasp of political principles is superficial. Typically they invoke ideological claims as support for tribal commitments; but, lacking full understanding of the principles, their argument falls apart quickly when challenged. Their usual response is to keep shifting to different semi-principled justifications for their tribal interest, with no overall logical coherence. This is most of what you get when reading amateur politics on the web.

For someone with a stage 4 understanding, arguing with someone like this can be infuriating, because they don’t seem to actually care about the principles, only to assert them when convenient. (Stage 4 cares passionately about principles.) The modal political junkie doesn’t ever seem to know when they’ve lost an argument; they just keep throwing up new objections that don’t quite work either.

In the page on atomized politics↗︎︎, I’ll suggest that developing a systematic political understanding has become an important status symbol over the past decade. It’s proof of the ability to think coherently, in an era in which coherence has disintegrated. Unfortunately, this has significantly contributed↗︎︎ to the increasing polarization of politics during that period.

Eschewing meta-political nihilism

By “meta-political nihilism” I mean the stance that politics is meaningless, and therefore should be ignored.11 Three different insights about political meaninglessness can lead to this view. I’ll explain how are each is partly accurate and valuable, but limited.

The sense that politics is so screwed up that it is hopeless can make you wish that it were meaningless, and so pretend to yourself that it is meaningless. But it is not meaningless—there is much at stake—and not, I think, hopeless.

Three paths to meta-political nihilism

Centrism can lead to nihilism. Centrists observe, accurately, that often the left and right take extreme views on a policy question only for the sake of general political strategy, rather than for reasons based in the specifics of the issue. A middle position may be better, but both sides are unwilling to compromise, not out of actual conviction, but as a game tactic.12 Partisans may also have been able to convince themselves of extreme positions as a consequence of eternalist absolutism; whereas centrists are more likely to recognize the nebulosity of the issue.

Pointing out the errors in extreme positions often only gets you flak from both sides. Culture warriors already know their tribal positions are wrong, but feel they must defend them; making that explicit just annoys them. Recognizing this dynamic does make politics look like a meaningless squabble between two monkey troupes.

Political scientists have found↗︎︎ that, over the past couple decades, American centrists have become less and less willing to express opinions, or to engage with either side. Many have withdrawn from politics. This creates a void, which heightens polarization, reinforces the impression that you must swear allegiance to one tribe or the other, and increases still further both sides’ hostility to the middle.

As a second path to nihilism, many partisans eventually do come to realize that tribal politics is wrong. At some point, you start asking yourself “why do I believe this,” and find the answer “because all Good people do” inadequate. (Often this is triggered by accidentally making friends with someone who is not a member of the Good Tribe, having a non-confrontational discussion of a political issue, and finding what they say is weird, but not what you thought the Bad Tribe believed, and that it seems to have just as much connection with reality as what you had believed.) Rather than moving to the center, you may then conclude that all political opinions are arbitrary, motivated only by tribalism, and adopt the nihilistic stance. This is a “3.5” nihilism, intermediate between the tribal and systematic stages.

Alternatively, at that point, you may start looking for some better basis for political judgement. You ask “so how can I know what is right, if not just on the basis of tribalism?” Then you may adopt a systematic, principled ideology. Rather than arguing with tribalists, you argue with other ideologues.

Eventually, if you are intellectually honest, you will realize that neither your system, nor any other, can provide consistently accurate answers to practical political questions. And this is the third path to political nihilism, if you conclude that politics is hopeless and meaningless because all systems are wrong. That is stage 4.5, post-systematic nihilism.

The appeal and faults of meta-political nihilism

The central promise of nihilism—not just in politics but overall—is that you don’t have to care. You don’t have to care because it doesn’t mean anything. When politics looks like a chaotic nightmare full of screaming enraged idiots, the promise that it is just sound and fury, signifying nothing, is highly attractive. Nihilism promises that you have no responsibility. When wading into that insane morass looks hopeless, that promise comes as a great relief.

Nihilism offers cool, quiet simplicity and clarity. Clarity that there is definitely no meaning to be found—in politics, for instance—so you need not try to find it. You need not engage with the maddening nebulosity of social issues: the unavoidable ambiguities of right and wrong, the uncertainties of policy outcomes, the constant change that quickly dissolves the underpinnings of any judgement, the mind-boggling complexity of institutions and their incentives and processes.

Nihilism promises that, since it’s all meaningless anyway, things can’t get any worse. For nihilism, everything is always at the zero point. There’s no hope of improvement, but no need to fear negative developments either.

These promises are so appealing that, I think, most people fall into meta-political nihilism quite often, even though nearly everyone is committed↗︎︎ to some form of political eternalism.13

But, nihilism is wrong. Obviously so.

Politics matters. There is much at stake.

Politics could get much, much worse. Things look a little sketchy here in 2016—but we need some perspective. Compared with most of the 20th century, it’s practically utopian. The quality of governance globally is massively better now than at any time before this century. Even in the developed world, it’s mostly better than in, say, the 1970s.

Developing a fluid, meta-systematic understanding of politics

Systems of government are important and necessary, and a huge improvement on pre-systematic tribalism. However, getting them right cannot, by itself, solve political problems. Systematic political eternalism imagines that a government is a machine, and if designed correctly, you can just set it running and it will get all the right answers. But governments are not, and cannot be, machines.

Moving beyond the systematic view requires recognizing that governmental systems are always nebulous: ambiguous, incomplete, changing, imperfect, and impermanent. This is not because we have yet to locate the correct system; it’s an inherent consequence of the way all systems work.

The actual operation of government orients to a systematic, legal framework; but cannot, even in principle, be governed by it. Laws, regulations, and procedures always have to be interpreted in a concrete situation; they can never be specific enough to spell out precisely what should be done in every instance. This interpretation is always a matter of continual renegotiation; an ongoing accomplishment of participants in particular circumstances. (This language is the same I recently used in discussing gender—not coincidentally!)

No system can guarantee good government. People run a government, not vice versa. Good government requires good faith.

Good societies are those in which there is common knowledge↗︎︎ that most people—and especially most in government—are mostly committed to doing the right thing, where “the right thing” is not definable ahead of time. “Doing the right thing” cannot be forced by any system, because nebulosity makes it impossible to foresee all future circumstances and specify what would be right to do then.

Doing the right thing is always collaboratively improvised in concrete circumstances. Well-designed institutions are powerful resources in that collaborative improvisation. However, they are only tools for doing the right thing, never guarantors of it. There are ways to encourage ethical responsiveness↗︎︎, but no way to enforce it.

Stage 5 sees society as an assemblage of transient, contingent systems, which have relative functional value but no ultimate justification. It sees conflicts between groups with different interests as inevitable, and ultimately as non-problematic, even if sometimes harmful in the short run. Since it sees all values as negotiable—although some are more important than others—it has the capacity to build bridges between competing groups and to help resolve their conflicts. It sees changes in values and structures over time as an inherent feature of all systems, and so seeks to steer them toward positive innovations, rather than insisting on preserving a system’s current self-definition.

That is quite abstract. Producing a specific fluid politics is a massive project, that can only be carried forward by many people in collaboration. I do plan to sketch some aspects of one in the fluid mode↗︎︎ chapter of Meaningness and Time.

In practice, a first step is getting a critical mass of people to stage 5. I have suggested that a bridging structure is needed to support that transition—just as a bridge of social and cultural support is important in the 3-to-4 transition. I am working toward building one.

  • 1. It may be that no one believes this “standard” theory. It’s roughly what’s taught in a civics class, so everyone’s discourse orients to it, even though it may not reflect any reality.
  • 2. This folk theory of political conflict is obviously derived from the folk theory of religious conviction. That theory is also wrong, for the same reasons.
  • 3. Caleb Crain, “The case against democracy↗︎︎.”
  • 4. Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why it Matters↗︎︎, p. 101. Quote lightly edited for clarity. TL;DR: in many cases, shockingly little; although (surprise!) voters from socially dominant demographic categories know more. Perhaps more interestingly, they found that better-informed voters are less likely to vote for their tribal interest, and more likely to favor policies of general benefit. There’s an extended summary of the book here↗︎︎.
  • 5. Quote is from the blurb, rather than the book itself. Emphasis added.
  • 6. One should be skeptical, at first, about any claims about unconscious psychological processes—because how could we know? Weeden and Kurzban correlate survey data on people’s stated political values, their socioeconomic circumstances, and their stated policy preferences. They find higher correlations between socioeconomic factors and policy preferences than between political ideology and policy preferences.
  • 7. To keep this page shorter than an encyclopedia, I am resisting the temptation to go into detail on the political role of each of these confused stances, and how they might be defused.
  • 8. This political application is purely speculative. Kegan’s work is based on extensive empirical study; I’m just waving my hands.
  • 9. A future page of Meaningness will explain nebulosity’s thrashing of logic in mind-numbing technical detail, for the sake of a certain class of math geeks. For the sake of religious Bayesians, I should mention that it also thrashes probabilistic inference. Uncertainty is not the problem; it is ambiguity.
  • 10. Blankenhorn quote edited for concision.
  • 11. This is unrelated to the political movement↗︎︎ called “nihilism,” which advocated revolutionary socialist anarchism, and was not nihilist in the present sense at all.
  • 12. The middle is not always correct; I am not advocating centrism for its own sake. Centrism can be motivated just by aversion to conflict, which may be mere cowardice↗︎︎. However, the more polarized politics gets, the more often centrists will be right on average.
  • 13. In fact, political nihilism may motivate systematic political eternalism. Michael Travers’ essay “Three forms of antipolitics↗︎︎” suggests that rationalists, libertarians, and Neoreactionaries all advocate logical systems as a way of avoiding the messiness of political conflict. This seems right. Eternalism and nihilism take opposite stands on meaningfulness, but both are based on rejecting nebulosity—i.e. messiness. Both are obviously wrong, but adopting the complete stance requires you to engage with nebulosity squarely, which is so off-putting that it’s common to jump back and forth between eternalism and nihilism to avoid it. In terms of Kegan’s developmental theory↗︎︎, rationalism and libertarianism both typically exhibit stage 4 (systematic) reasoning. Some Neoreactionaries have moved beyond that, explicitly recognizing↗︎︎ the inherent limits of systems. The danger here is falling into stage 4.5 nihilism. The “Dark Enlightenment” branch of Neoreaction has, unfortunately, succumbed to that. Others may be working toward a positive meta-systematic alternative, although none is as yet in evidence.

Upgrade your cargo cult for the win

Cargo cult plane made from sticks and straw

If you create a good enough airport—the cargo will come.

What does it take for an individual to do innovative intellectual work, such as scientific discovery? Mere mastery of methods is not good enough.

What does it take for a community or institution to address a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous↗︎︎ world effectively? Mission statements, structures, principles, and procedures are not good enough.

Cargo cult science

Richard Feynman—the foremost physicist of the mid-20th century—gave a famous commencement address on “cargo cult science↗︎︎.”1

During World War II, many Pacific islands that previously had little or no contact with the modern world were used as air bases by the Americans or Japanese. Suddenly, enormous quantities of food, clothes, tools, and equipment, such as the islanders had never seen, appeared out of the sky in magic flying boats. Some of this “cargo” trickled down to the natives, and it was fabulous. Then the war ended, the planes vanished, and—no more cargo!

How to make the cargo flow again? The islanders had observed that, just before cargo arrived, the foreigners performed elaborate rituals involving inscrutable religious paraphernalia. Clearly, these summoned the sky spirits that brought cargo.

Religious entrepreneurs founded cults that duplicated sky spirit rituals using locally-produced copies of the paraphernalia. They imitated the actions of the airstrip ground crews using wicker control towers, coconut headsets, and straw planes (such as the one photographed above). Some cargo cults are still going↗︎︎, generations later, despite their failure to deliver even one landing by the sky spirits. Ha ha, stupid primitive savages!

Except, this is a perfect metaphor for most of what is called “science,” done by people with PhDs.

“Cargo cult science” performs rituals that imitate science, but are not science. Real science sometimes delivers cargo (fame and promotions for scientists; profits for R&D companies; technologies for everyone else). So, you think, OK, what do I have to do to make that happen? How did those guys do it? So you look to see what they did, and you do the same thing. But usually that doesn’t work well.

“Doing what scientists do” is not doing science, and won’t deliver—just as “doing what a ground crew does” doesn’t bring planes. It’s just going through the motions.

But exactly why doesn’t it work? And what does work? What makes the difference between cargo cult science and the real thing?

Cargo cults everywhere

“Cargo cult” describes not just science, but much of what everyone does in sophisticated rich countries. I’m not speaking of our religions; I mean our jobs and governments and schools and medical systems, which frequently fail to deliver. Companies run on cargo cult business management; states run on cargo cult policies; schools run on cargo cult education theories (Feynman mentioned this one); mainstream modern medicine is mostly witch doctoring.

An outsider could see that these cannot deliver, because they are scripted busy-work justified by ideologies that lack contact with reality. Often they imitate activities that did work once, for reasons that have been forgotten or were never understood.

So how do you go beyond cargo cultism? How do you do actual science? Or economics or policy; education or medicine?

And why is cargo cultism so common, if it keeps failing to deliver?

Upgrading

In some video games↗︎︎, you direct the technical and economic development of a handful of hunter-gatherers in straw huts. You start them farming, and they multiply. They build a wooden palisade to keep out hostile strangers. You invent the plow, so their farms become more efficient, and the village grows into a small town. You start them mining, and they build stone houses, and a stone wall to repel invasions. You discover copper smelting and they can make metal plows and swords. And so on—upgrading technology step by step, until eventually your people develop fusion power, take over the whole earth, build spaceships, and set off to colonize the galaxy.

So what about those stupid savages, doing their silly rituals on their Pacific islands?

Suppose they got their imitation runway level enough, and put tarmac on it, and upgraded the control tower from straw to wood to concrete, and installed modern radar and landing control systems, and sent their “ground crew” to Pittsburgh to be trained and certified.

What then?

Imitation and learning know-how

Campy scientists

Let’s say you are a new graduate student starting a science PhD program. What you learned as an undergraduate were an enormous number of facts, a few calculation methods, and basic familiarity with some experimental equipment. You learned mainly by being lectured at in classrooms, by reading, by solving artificial puzzle-like problems, and in lab courses where you used the equipment to try to get the known-correct answer to make-believe “experiments.” None of this is anything like actual science: discovering previously-unknown truths.2

Much education assumes the wrong idea that learning consists of ingesting bits of knowledge (facts, concepts, procedures), and storing them, and when you have enough, you can make useful deductions using innate human reasoning. A more sophisticated wrong idea is that there are methods of thinking, and once you have learned them, you can use them reliably. Both of these are partly true—you do need to learn and remember and use facts, and learn and practice and use rational methods—but they are not sufficient.

You can’t learn how to do science from classes or books (although what you do learn there is important). You certainly can’t figure out how to do it from rational first principles! No one has any detailed rational theory of how science works.3 More generally, you mostly can’t learn doing from books or classes or reasoning; you can only learn doing by doing.

In doing, ability precedes understanding, which precedes representation. Knowing-how is not reducible to↗︎︎ knowing-that.4 Riding a bicycle is the classic example: no amount of classroom instruction, or rational reflection, could enable a novice to stay upright.

How do you learn know-how?

Imitation is one powerful and common way↗︎︎—one that is unfortunately underemphasized in current American theories of education. The Melanesian cargo cults were founded on the accurate observation that imitation often results in new abilities that you do not understand—at first, at least.

In fact, you start doing science—or any serious intellectual work—by imitation, by going through the motions, not seeing the point of the rituals. Gradually you come to understand something of how and why they work. (If you are smart and lucky; many people never do.) Gradually, you find yourself doing the real thing. At some point, you can improvise, step into the unknown, and create your own methods.

In other words, you can only begin your career as a scientist by doing cargo-cult science. Eventually—if you are smart and lucky—you can upgrade. But almost all scientists get stuck at the cargo cult stage; and almost all supposed science is cargo culting.

Cargo cult science, and cargo cult government and management and education, are based on the perfectly sensible principle of imitation. Why doesn’t that work? Why isn’t classroom science instruction plus learning through imitation good enough?

Why isn’t imitation a sufficient upgrade?

Actually… Why don’t the literal cargo cults work? The answer is not quite as obvious as it may seem at first!

The first obvious answer is: Ha ha, straw airplanes can’t fly, and coconuts are not headphones. But that’s wrong. Proper technology is neither necessary nor sufficient for a functional airport:

  • I have landed (as a passenger) at a remote airport in Alaska that consisted of a dry river bed with the larger rocks cleared off, plus a closet-sized wooden shed with emergency fuel and repair supplies.

  • If someone installed a complete airport facility with all the latest technology on one of the cargo cult islands, and then left, that would be a useless pile of junk. Without a competent ground crew, the buildings and equipment are not an airport.

Better technology would be a significant upgrade—but it is not the whole answer, or even the main one. It would not make the cargo come.

The second obvious answer is: Ha ha, the cargo cultists are only imitating a ground crew; they have no understanding, so they are just going through the motions. But this isn’t right either. Imitating is often a good way of learning, and understanding an activity is often neither necessary nor sufficient to performing it—even to performing it excellently.

You don’t need understanding to ride a bicycle. In fact, almost no one has an accurate mental model of how a bicycle works.5 I am pretty confident that much of what an expert ground crew does, they don’t understand either.

Better understanding, like better technology, would be a significant upgrade for a cargo cult. The same is true in cargo cult science. One commonly suggested antidote is to understand the principles of the field, so you know why its methods work, and aren’t just performing experiments as inscrutable rituals. I advocated this in “How to think real good,” and it’s important enough that I’m working on a post just on it, to follow up this one.

What are “principles” and how do you find them? If they are so great, why aren’t they just taught in the introductory class? Partly because even the best people in the field can’t quite say what the principles are, because tacit understanding↗︎︎ does not always enable explicit explanation. Also, many methods are worked out by trial and error, by many people over many years; they do work, but it’s not clearly known why.

Anyway, I doubt a ground crew knows, or is taught, any profound principles of airport operation. The problem with imitation is not solely or primarily lack of deep understanding.

What is missing?

Feynman found the question awkward:

[Cargo cult scientists] follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones.

He goes on to suggest that “utter honesty” is the key. He also describes this as “scientific integrity.” And, he points out ruefully, this is rarely taught:

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.

If this is as important as he—and I—believe, we ought to ask why it is not taught in universities. (I’ll suggest a reason later in this post.)

I vaguely remember being taught something like this in high school, or even grade school. At that point, it’s irrelevant because you can’t understand what scientific honesty even means until you do your own research.

Until then, there’s only what Feynman calls “conventional honesty,” meaning you don’t make things up. If the meter read 2.7, you put 2.7 in your report, even though 3.9 would be much more exciting.

Although I do consider “utter honesty” important, I don’t think it’s quite right that this is what cargo cult science lacks.6 Or anyway, it’s not the whole story. I think it points in a promising direction, however: toward epistemic virtue.

Epistemic virtue and epistemic vice

Honesty is a moral virtue. It is also an epistemic virtue↗︎︎. Epistemic virtues are cognitive traits that tend to lead to accurate knowledge and understanding. Tenacity, courage, generosity, conscientiousness, and curiosity are some other epistemic virtues—which is why I said I think “utter honesty” is not the whole story.7

Cargo cult science is bad science; and “bad” is a moral, or at least normative, term. Upgrading a cargo cult is, I think, a moral responsibility. Doing bad science is wrong—in a specialized way that goes beyond everyday morality.

What did Feynman mean by “utter honesty”? He didn’t explain exactly, but he did say that it’s not mostly about scientific fraud. Avoiding that is a very low bar, and fraud is relatively rare,8 and easy to eschew. Not committing fraud is, as he puts it, “conventional honesty,” not the special “utter honesty” required in science—and, I would argue, in all intellectual work.

Utter honesty, I suspect, means not just telling the truth, but caring about the truth. Feynman uses the phrase “bending over backward” to suggest a higher standard. You will go to extreme lengths to avoid fooling yourself—partly because then you won’t fool others, but more importantly because you really want to know what’s going on.

“Utter honesty” is about overcoming the “good enough” mediocrity of cargo cult science. Mediocrity comes from going along with the social conventions of your field; accepting its assumptions uncritically; using its methods without asking hard questions about whether they actually do what they are supposed to.

Cargo cultism is the bureaucratic rationality of blindly following established procedures and respecting authority. In the moral domain, that can lead ordinary people into committing genocide without reflection; in science, it leads to nutritional recommendations that may also have killed millions of people. When you look into how those recommendations were arrived at, it becomes obvious that honesty would compel the entire field of nutrition science to resign in recognition of its total failure—both scientific failure and moral failure.

Unflinching lustful curiosity

Important as honesty is, I might rate even higher curiosity, courage, and desire. These are not separable from each other, or from honesty, but it may be helpful to present them as facets of epistemic virtue.

Be curious!

Yeah, good, whatever…

Exhortations to epistemic virtue, and lists of virtues, are not helpful by themselves. We need details. For that, we need to look carefully at specific cases in which epistemic virtue or vice led to success or failure. From them, we can extract heuristics and principles.9

Curiosity

Feynman’s best case study is the rat-running one. (It’s a little too complicated to explain here; it’s near the end of his talk↗︎︎ if you still haven’t read that!) It seems to me that the scientists who got this wrong weren’t dishonest. They were incurious: they didn’t actually care about rats. They lacked intellectual desire. They lacked the courage to say “maybe we keep getting inconsistent results because our experimental apparatus is defective.” At some level, they understood that admitting this would lead to a lot of boring difficult work, for which there would be no career reward. (As, Feynman says, occurred: the guy who figured out the problem was ignored and never cited.)

Honesty comes out of curiosity, mostly, I think. If you really do want to know, there’s much less motivation to promote a wrong answer—arrived at either through deliberate fraud or sloppy, inadequately-controlled experimentation.

A reliable recipe for “how to be curious” is impossible (and probably undesirable—you need to choose skillfully what to be curious about). However, we can and should give descriptions of what curiosity is like, so you can recognize when you are curious—and when you are not. Cargo cult science comes from merely going through the motions because you don’t care enough about understanding the phenomena you are studying. It is common for graduate students, or postdocs, or professors, to gradually lose interest in their field without even noticing. Then you do bad work.

Desire

Curiosity is not just caring about which facts are true versus false. It is lust for understanding. What matters is that you want, above all else, to figure out what is actually going on.

Where does curiosity come from? It is not “disinterested,” as some philosophers of science would advocate. You want to know what is actually going on because the thing is cool. If you don’t love your phenomenon of study, you won’t care enough to want to understand it. I would guess that liking rats, finding them cute and funny and interesting and enjoying their company, can make you a better rat-running scientist.

I wrote about this in “Going down on the phenomenon,” making an extended metaphor with sexual desire—which is why I use the term “lust” here.

Beyond respect, one must care about the phenomenon. It seems to me that most academic intellectuals I talk to do not genuinely care about their subject matter. They are more interested in getting papers out of it than they are in learning about it. Analogously, many people in approaching sex are more interested in getting something out of someone than they are in learning about another person (and themselves).

Courage

Rangda
Rangda

Every scientist (probably—me for sure) sometimes screws up and promotes an attractive idea that isn’t actually right. That’s unavoidable, probably. Courage and honesty means recognizing and admitting this when it happens, and being as transparent as possible so other people can detect it.

Courage and honesty may also demand that you be transparent about going beyond the boundaries of your discipline. That can be a taboo—but breaking it is a virtue, because mindlessly adhering to disciplinary conventions is a main cause of cargo cult science. A seminal and excellent paper on research management↗︎︎10 explains:

Research has come to be as ritualistic as the worship of a primitive tribe, and each established discipline has its own ritual. As long as the administrator operates within the rituals of the various disciplines, he is relatively safe. But let him challenge the adequacy of ritualistic behavior and he is in hot water with everyone.

The first conviction of the research specialist is that a problem can be factored in such a way that his particular specialty is the only important aspect. If he has difficulty in making this assumption, he will try to redefine the problem in such a way that he can stay within the boundaries of his ritual. If all else fails, he will argue that the problem is not “appropriate.” Research specialists, like all other living organisms, will go to great lengths to maintain a comfortable position. Having invested much time and energy in becoming specialists in a given methodology, they can be expected to resist efforts to expand the boundaries of the methodology or to warp the methodology into an unfamiliar framework.

I’ll give one example. It is self-serving, but I hope you’ll forgive that if you find it funny. It was a time while I was a graduate student in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. When anyone asked what I was up to, I replied honestly:

I’m reading about↗︎︎ the Balinese Rangda-Barong ritual↗︎︎ so I can use existential phenomenology to figure out how to make breakfast.

This was something of a risk.11 It is not the sort of thing EECS students are encouraged to spend their time on. My research was funded by the US Department of Defense. The DOD might not have looked favorably on having their money spent on tantric rituals, phenomenology, or breakfast-making. On the other hand, my understanding of those things led directly to new technical methods and insights that underlie the current generation of military robots. (For better or worse.)

If you do realize that you have lost interest in your field—the fire has gone out of your romance—it may take huge courage to admit that and leave. It’s the right thing to do, though.

Legitimate peripheral participation

Earlier, I asked: why isn’t learning know-how through imitation (plus learning facts through classroom instruction) good enough? Part of the answer is: you need feedback, not just a passive source of emulation.

Consider learning to drive a car. When you take a driving class, you get a bit of lecturing, and there’s a booklet you’re supposed to read, but they don’t tell you anything that isn’t obvious. Are you ready to learn by imitation? No, that would be disastrous. As I wrote elsewhere↗︎︎:12

You need someone to teach you how to drive; someone who will sit beside you and explain the controls, and give directions, and watch you screw up, and tell you what to do instead. The skill can only be transmitted by apprenticeship.

Situated learning theory↗︎︎ explains apprenticeship as legitimate peripheral participation↗︎︎ in a community of practice.13 Let’s unpack that.

You learn know-how by doing. However, in most cases, just doing on your own is inadequate. Imitation is also mainly inadequate—as the Melanesian cargo cults so dramatically illustrate. Participation means doing with other people who know what they are doing. Typically, we learn from collaboration, not from observing and then accurately duplicating the action by ourselves. We aren’t that smart!

Legitimate means that you are accepted as part of the group activity, and given a role within it that everyone agrees to. If you walk out onto an airport landing strip and start “helping,” you probably won’t learn anything (even if you aren’t immediately dragged away by security dudes). Members of a ground crew have complex, interlocking duties; you have to fit into that schema to participate.

Becoming a junior member of a research team grants you the legitimacy needed for participation in its scientific activity. This cognitive apprenticeship↗︎︎ is the only way to learn to be a scientist.

Peripheral means that the group initially assigns you a minor role: simple, low-risk tasks that are nevertheless useful. As you master each, you are given increasing responsibility, and trickier, more central roles.

Legitimate peripheral participation is a major reason someone would bother to tutor you. In formal instruction, teachers get paid. But most learning is informal, and most “teaching” is unpaid. The learner’s valuable labor gets exchanged for tuition. This is part of the science system, too: graduate students and postdocs contribute to their professor’s research program.

Legitimate peripheral participation is a more powerful motivation for accurate feedback than money. If a student’s labor contributes to the success or failure of your project, you want to be sure they are doing it right—and so you will scrutinize their work carefully, and give detailed corrective advice.

Feedback is not the whole story, however. People learn from collaboration in ways that go beyond both imitation and explicit correction. We pick up a great deal “by osmosis,” as Feynman put it. The situated learning research program has observed this carefully in hundreds of diverse contexts, and has gone some way toward explaining how it works.

The problem with the cargo cults is not that they are imitating. It’s that their members are not legitimate participants in airport operation.

Imagine a cargo cult downloaded all the manuals for ground crew procedures from the web, and watched thousands of hours of videos of competent ground crews doing their jobs. Imagine they learned them perfectly, and were able to execute them perfectly.

Still no airline would be willing to use their airport. The cult is not certified for operation; it is not legitimate. The proper bureaucratic rituals have not been observed. These rituals are rational: there has to be a fixed procedure for assuring that a ground crew is competent, and making special exceptions could be disastrous. “These cultists sure seem to know what they are doing; let’s create a set of tests to verify that, without putting them through our usual training regimen”? That would risk airplanes and lives, and would probably end the careers of everyone involved.

Communities of practice

A community of practice↗︎︎ develops informally and automatically among any group of people who engage in an activity that requires specialized know-how. Whether you are getting seriously into knitting or tokamak optimization, you want and need to talk to other people doing that.

Informal contact naturally develops into a feeling of community. That typically becomes increasingly structured, with multiple communication channels, central authorities, cliques and factions, scheduled and spontaneous group events, and so on. Leaders may formalize the community into an organization, with defined roles and procedures. Air transport organizations take formal bureaucratic rationality to extremes; science somewhat less so.

A community of practice develops its own culture, worldview, and way of being. That includes its own ethical norms, and its own epistemic norms. These may be partly formalized, but remain mainly tacit. They are absorbed by osmosis, as know-how more than as know-that. They are “the way we do things,” which members can gesture at, but not necessarily explain. Becoming a ground crew member, or a scientist, requires a process of enculturation to acquire this tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge often contradicts explicit standards—and therefore could not, even in principle, be learned from manuals. In every workplace, there are the official rules, and then there is “the way we do things,” which involves extensive implicit exceptions.14 Those are not ethical norm violations—from the community’s point of view, at least—because “the way we do things” is the ethical standard of the workplace. In every laboratory, there is the protocol manual’s way to run an assay, and there is the way “we” run the assay. That is not an epistemic norm violation—from this research group’s point of view, at least—because the way “we” run the assay is better; or at least takes a lot less hassle and “works perfectly OK.” (Which may very well be true—or not.)

Every social group has two inseparable aspects: it is an invaluable and inescapable resource, but also a zone of socially-enforced conformity, thought-taboos, and dysfunctional practices and attitudes. Every intellectual community transmits to its members a mixture of epistemic virtues and epistemic vices. Some are far more virtuous than others, but none is perfect, nor perfectly depraved.15

Epistemic virtue and vice are not just learned from a community of practice, they inhere in it. The ways that community members interact, and the way the community comes to consensus as a body, are epistemically virtuous or depraved partly independent of the epistemic qualities of individuals. Just as moral preference falsification↗︎︎ can lead a community of good people to do terrible things, epistemic preference falsification can lead a community of smart people to believe false or even absurd things.

The problem with nutrition “science” is not that individual nutritionists are stupid, ill-informed, or malicious. It is that the collective epistemic practices of the community are self-serving, wicked, wanton, paranoid, and deranged.16

Like other eternalisms↗︎︎, Melanesian cargo cults involve ideological “beliefs” that work quite differently from pragmatic beliefs like “my bicycle is blue.” Many Christians profess to “believe” the Rapture is imminent, but usually their actions show that this is not a belief in the ordinary sense. Cargo cultists may “believe” that their rituals will bring cargo, but this “belief” is probably as remote and theoretical as Christians’. Such “beliefs” have important functions in maintaining religious identity, membership, and institutions, and in advancing the careers of religious professionals, but they are not taken literally.

The “belief” that particular ritual activities will bring about scientific breakthroughs is often similarly unconnected with scientific discovery. Yet it is similarly important to the smooth functioning of “scientific” institutions and careers.

The replication crisis: mo’ betta rationality vs. epistemic vice

Clueful scientists have recognized for decades that most supposed science is actually cargo culting—but it seemed little could be done.

As Feynman said, cargo cult scientists “follow all the apparent precepts and forms.” The problem is mostly not disregard for epistemic norms; it is that the norms themselves are inadequate. But it is those very norms that define the epistemic community.

The current replication crisis↗︎︎ is driven largely by broad moral outrage.17 That motivates a research practices reform movement, seeking to correct epistemic failures that are due to rampant, collective epistemic vice. The moral character of that vice is stressed by some scientific community members—and resisted by others.

The old guard’s attitude is: We followed all the rules, so we deserve to be rewarded accordingly. To which the rebels say: Yes, but the things you thought you discovered weren’t true.

Leaders of cargo cults—in science as well as religion—usually fight to keep their status, power, and income, by opposing attempts at epistemic reform. “Science advances one funeral at a time,” wrote Max Planck:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.18

The current reform movement in academic psychology is led mainly by junior members of the epistemic community, and instigated partly by outsider skeptics. However, some senior members↗︎︎ have demonstrated heroic epistemic courage by retracting their own earlier work and advocating epistemic reform.

Reformers—in psychology and other fields such as medical research—advocate better explicit research practice standards. These valuable methods of technical rationality include, for example, more frequent replications; experiment pre-registration; publishing all negative results; reporting effect sizes; and abandoning the famously flawed p<0.05 significance test. If adopted, these will be significant upgrades in epistemic communities that have been practicing mainly cargo cult science. This will be a big win, I think!

Unfortunately… it also embodies the essential epistemological failure of cargo culting. That is the belief that there must be some definite method that will reliably bring the desired results. Then you just need to follow the recipe, and cargo will arrive, summoned by magic out of the sky.

But Campbell’s Law↗︎︎19 says that if you set up any explicit evaluation criteria, people will find ways to game the system. They’ll find ways to excel according to the standards, without producing your desired outcome. They’ll follow the letter of the rules, but not the spirit. John Ioannidis, who has done more than anyone to improve medical research standards, details exactly how and why this happens in his searing “Evidence-based medicine has been hijacked↗︎︎.” Institutional changes cannot guarantee science (or government, or education, or software development↗︎︎) that goes beyond cargo-cultish adherence to procedures.

So, better explicit epistemic norms are a significant upgrade, but they aren’t the answer. There is no substitute for actually trying to figure out what is going on. That requires technical rationality—but it also requires going beyond technical rationality.

There is no method: only methods

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.20

“There is no method” is a Dzogchen slogan. Dzogchen is unique among branches of Buddhism in offering no path↗︎︎ to enlightenment. This may seem paradoxical at first, because Dzogchen offers innumerable methods—probably more than any other Buddhist approach—and is widely considered the most reliable path to enlightenment.

There is no “The Scientific Method,” and science offers no path to truth. That may seem paradoxical at first, because science offers innumerable, excellent methods, and is the most reliable path to truth.

“The Scientific Method” is the central myth of rationalist eternalism↗︎︎. It is scientism’s eternal ordering principle↗︎︎—the magical entity that guarantees truth, understanding, and control. But no one can say what it is—because it does not exist. No one can explain how or why science works in general, nor how to do it.

We can say a lot about how and why specific methods work—and that is critical. Nevertheless, blind faith in any specific method separates you from the reality of what is actually going on. That is the essence of cargo culting.

The kind of upgrade you need to advance from cargo cult airport operation is critically different from the advance beyond cargo cult science:

  • Bureaucratic and technical rationality routinize airport operations, making them reliably good-enough. Conforming to the ritual norms of the ground crew practice community makes you a fully competent ground crew member.

  • Science—and any intellectual work involving innovation—addresses the unknown, and therefore must not be routinized, ritualized, or merely rationalized. Conforming to the ritual norms of a practice community does not produce discovery.

The reason Feynman’s “utter honesty” is not taught is that there is almost nothing to say about it—in general. Epistemic virtues are not methods; they are attitudes, and meta to methods.

Recognizing the limitations of rationalist rituals does not mean abandoning them. You have to use methods, and you also have to relativize them. You need meta-rational competence to recognize when a method is appropriate, and when it is not.21 There is no explicit method for that—but, like riding a bicycle, it can be cultivated as tacit know-how. “Reflection-in-action↗︎︎” describes that meta-level learning process.

For the individual, becoming an actual scientist requires two shifts in identity and membership:

  • First, you become a cargo cultist: a devout member of the community of practice. Acquiring know-how—explicit and tacit—is most of the work here. The way of being of a cargo cult scientist is social conformity.

  • When you have mastered the community’s methods, you see their limitations, and you transcend its epistemic norms, without abandoning them. Developing meta-rational know-how is part of this second shift. However, a shift in your relationship with the scientific community, from mere membership to meta-systematicity, is the key change in the way of being.

Being meta to your community implies critical reflection on its norms. It implies taking responsibility for community development, for upgrading it, while continuing your involvement in it.

Upgrade your community of practice

Despite heroic mythology, lone geniuses do not drive most scientific, cultural, business, or policy advances. Breakthroughs typically emerge from a scene: an exceptionally productive community of practice that develops novel epistemic norms. Major innovation may indeed take a genius—but the genius is created in part by a scenius↗︎︎.

“Scenius” stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

Individuals immersed in a scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.22

There is no systematic method for creating a scene, for improving epistemic norms, for conjuring scenius, or for upgrading a community of practice. These are “human-complete” meta-systematic tasks.

There is no method—but there are methods. There are activities, attitudes, and approaches that encourage scenius. These are available to individuals, institutions, or both. Neither can change a community’s epistemic norms unilaterally, but both can contribute to upgrades.

Kevin Kelly describes↗︎︎ some scene features that individuals can contribute to:

  • Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
  • Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
  • Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.

Management theorists describe “learning organizations” that don’t base themselves on fixed structures, principles, and procedures. Rather, they conduct continuous meta-systematic reflection on their own commitments, and revise those accordingly. Such organizations also foster the learning and development of their members so they can take on increasingly challenging, interesting, and valuable responsibilities. There are abstract and concrete steps an organization can take to transform itself from a cargo cult into a dynamically innovating scene.23

As one example, making it easier for members to switch fields would represent a major upgrade out of cargo cultism in universities and other large institutions. It would take enormous institutional reforms to allow that, and enormous resources to support people in transition, and that would require enormous institutional courage—but it may pay off enormously, too. Fields often advance rapidly when they are joined by talented outsiders who bring powerful, different ways of thinking. And, clearing out the deadwood of people who have fallen out of love with their disciplines would allow vigorous new growth in the fields they leave—without requiring funerals!

Recap: For the win!

Too much of life is wasted going through the motions, playing it by the book, acting according to systems no one really believes in and that fail to reflect a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous↗︎︎ world. This is deadening for individuals, and for society a vast loss of opportunities for prosperity and innovation.

The lesson of cargo cult science for all human activity is that fixed systems are inadequate, because they never fully engage with the nebulosity↗︎︎ of reality. We can, and must, upgrade to better ways of thinking, acting, and organizing our communities.

As individuals, we acquire basic competence through legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice. In becoming a member, we absorb the community’s explicit and tacit norms—including ethical, epistemological, and process norms. Some communities of practice have mainly functional norms; some are highly dysfunctional.

Communities can upgrade their norms—the research practices reform movement is my main example in this post—and individuals can contribute such upgrades. Still, acting according to even the best norms can produce only routine performance, and it inhibits fundamental innovation and discovery.

As individuals, innovation and discovery demand meta-systematic competence. Once we have achieved mastery of the methods of a community of practice, we can reflect on how and when and why they do and do not work well. Then we can accurately select, combine, revise, discover, and create methods.

Communities (including, but not only, institutions) can take a meta-systematic view of themselves. They can reflect on their own goals, structure, dynamics, and norms. Such reflection may afford much greater leverage than incremental process optimization.

In plainer words: win big!

  • 1. The full text↗︎︎ of Feynman’s talk is on the web; it also appears in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!↗︎︎, a collection of his wit and wisdom, which I recommend highly.
  • 2. Some universities do expose undergraduates to actual science, through legitimate peripheral participation in real research projects.
  • 3. The theories of the philosophy of science are laughably inadequate. They were invented by philosophers sitting in armchairs trying to work out from first principles how science ought to work. If you attempt to apply these theories to actual scientists doing actual science, you soon find that they explain nothing. Understanding of how and why science works would have to come from extensive, detailed, theory-neutral observation of scientists going about their business. Tragically little work of that sort has been done; and even the best has been marred by theoretical and political axe-grinding.
  • 4. Knowing-how is not in general reducible to knowing-that. There may be exceptions: recipes do work. But, the ability to follow a recipe depends on the ability to, for instance, chop vegetables. You don’t learn that as facts, but by imitation, legitimate peripheral participation (helping a parent make dinner), and experience. More generally: explicit, systematic, rational understanding always rests on tacit, non-systematic, pre-rational skills-in-action.
  • 5. Most people who ride bicycles every day don’t even know what one looks like! That may sound preposterous, but it’s supported by strong experimental evidence which I explained here, and which you can easily replicate for yourself as a fun party game.
  • 6. A limitation in Feynman’s talk is that it lumps outright woo (astrology) with bad but institutionally sanctioned science (inadequate controls in experiments on rats in mazes). The failures of both may ultimately stem from the same abstract epistemological vices, but this is not obvious. The dynamics are sufficiently different in details that separate analyses would be helpful. Everyday common sense should be adequate to dispel woo, whereas bad institutional science can usually only be corrected with specialized technical methods of rationality. “Utter honesty” is required for good science, but ordinary layperson’s skepticism is adequate to address astrology.
  • 7. Feynman’s explanation of “utter honesty” is vague; I imagine that he would have readily agreed that other epistemic virtues are important, or would have included them within “utter honesty.” Tantrikas will recognize a little joke here: “tenacity, courage, generosity, conscientiousness, and curiosity” correspond to the five elements↗︎︎ of Vajrayana.
  • 8. In some fields at least, more than half of published scientific papers are wrong↗︎︎ (according to recent replication studies), but deliberate fraud is the cause of only a tiny fraction of those. The rest are due to cargo culting. Scientific fraud is “rare” relative to incompetence and mediocrity, but still far too common.
  • 9.How to think real good” tried to do this; “What they don’t teach you at STEM school” promises to do more, but also points to books by other authors that contain such case studies.
  • 10. The Kennedy and Putt research administration paper was published twenty years before Feynman’s talk, and raises several of the same issues. I don’t know whether he was influenced by it. Kennedy and Putt also anticipate some of the 1980s anthropology-of-technology studies at Xerox PARC and the associated Institute for Research on Learning, which heavily influenced both my PhD research and this post. (The Lave and Wenger work I describe in the next section of the post was done at IRL, for instance.) My thanks to Sarah Perry↗︎︎ for drawing my attention to the paper.
  • 11. To spread the credit of courage around, I was willing to take this risk because I was at least tacitly supported in it by my supervisor, Rod Brooks↗︎︎—for whom that was probably also a risk, and who exercised the epistemic virtue of open-mindedness by putting up with my eccentricities. I am grateful.
  • 12. I also wrote about learning by imitation and apprenticeship in “Robots that dance.” Maybe I keep telling the same stories over, but this one is important, I think.
  • 13. Situated learning theory, legitimate peripheral participation, and communities of practice were introduced in Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation↗︎︎. That book had a big impact on me—and many others—at the time it was published. Wenger has written several follow-on volumes; they look very interesting, but I haven’t read them.
  • 14. The “ethnomethodological study of work,” a research program led by Lucy Suchman at Xerox PARC, investigates the relationship between explicit, systematic bureaucratic rationality and what people in bureaucracies actually do. Its findings strongly influenced my work in artificial intelligence, as Suchman mentions in passing in this interview↗︎︎.
  • 15. This is something every freshman should be told on arrival at a university—and the message should be repeated often. “Half the departments at this university teach complete hogwash. However, we can’t tell you which. Your most important task as an undergraduate—especially if you plan to go on to graduate school—is to figure out whether your field of choice is nonsense, or for real. No one knows how to do that for certain, but here are some factors to consider…” I plan a follow-up post about this.
  • 16. Many nutrition researchers must know that their field is intellectually bankrupt, but they persist because it’s “the way we do things.” This does show cowardice, at minimum, so there is some individual culpability. By the way, I used precisely five derogatory adjectives here… Why?
  • 17. I’m wary of moral outrage in general, and especially collective outrage, but the replication crisis is a case in which it appears both justified and effective.
  • 18. A fascinating 2015 study↗︎︎ demonstrated the truth of Planck’s principle empirically, by looking at changes in publication patterns after famous scientists’ deaths. The Planck quotes are from his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers.
  • 19. Currently better known as Goodhart’s Law↗︎︎, but Campbell’s formulation is closer to what is usually meant.
  • 20. On the web, this is widely attributed to the haiku master Bashō Matsuo. However, Bashō himself attributed it to the Buddhist innovator Nanzan Daishi, who lived a thousand years earlier.
  • 21. Another way of putting this, in the language of adult developmental theory↗︎︎, is that airport operations require stage 4 (systematic) cognition, but scientific innovation requires stage 5 (meta-systematic) cognition.
  • 22. “Scenius” was coined by Brian Eno, who wrote the first paragraph of the quote. The second paragraph is from the linked essay by Kevin Kelly. My thanks to Hokai Sobol↗︎︎ for introducing me to the concept.
  • 23. I’m thinking here of the work of, for example, Robert Kegan↗︎︎, John Seely Brown↗︎︎, Donald Schön and Chris Argyris↗︎︎, and Etienne Wenger↗︎︎.

A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse

Surrealistic bridges to a distant island castle
“Bridges to the Neverland” (CC)↗︎︎ George Grie

To prevent civilizational collapse, a bridge may be necessary—specifically for geeks—between systematic rationality and fluid, meta-rational understanding. (Not to be alarmist or anything.)

This is an obscure and superficially implausible claim. Here’s why I think the bridge may be needed—and a sketch of how to start building it.

Stages and bridges

My conceptual framework draws on Robert Kegan’s model of adult cognitive, affective, and social development↗︎︎. (I recently posted a summary↗︎︎ elsewhere. This metablog post will be easier to understand if you know Kegan’s model, so it will be helpful read that post first.)

Kegan describes three stages of adult development (numbered 3, 4, and 5). We could call them pre-rational, rational, and meta-rational. These stages are distinctive, internally consistent, relatively-well-functioning modes for organizing one’s thinking, one’s self, and one’s relationships. They might be described as “islands of psychological stability.” To progress from one island to the next, you must cross a heaving sea of psychological confusion, in which the previous mode no longer seems functional, but you cannot yet operate in the next mode reliably. These stage transitions are emotionally and cognitively difficult, and typically take several years, during which one may think, feel, and act inconsistently.

Ideally, a society and culture provides “bridges” of support from one stage to the next. To some extent, ours does. However, Kegan pointed out that we have allowed the bridge from stage 3 to 4 to fall into disrepair. We are not adequately teaching young adults how to be rational, systematic, or modern. This is the central theme of his In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life↗︎︎.

This problem seems to have only gotten worse in the two decades since he wrote that. That is what makes me fear civilizational collapse. Keeping modern institutions operating requires cognitively modern, rational operators. We may be destroying the conditions necessary to produce them. I’ll explain this in more detail later.

Our society and culture do even less to support the transition from stage 4 to 5. This transition, between the rational and meta-rational stages, is particularly difficult; and no bridge has yet been built. This is an unrecognized lack—and so, an opportunity to contribute. It has, perhaps, never been seriously attempted, so it may be unexpectedly easy: “low-hanging fruit” that has not yet been plucked.

Between stages 4 and 5, there is a gap, a stretch of open ocean. One recognizes the limitations of rationality, but can’t yet work effectively in the meta-rational mode. Many people get stuck treading water here, trying to stay afloat, often not even able to see the dry land of meta-rationality on the horizon. With rationality seeming the only basis for meaning, they fall into nihilistic↗︎︎ depression. This is sometimes informally called “stage 4.5,” although it is not a “stage” in the same sense as the others. It is not a workable mode of organization. However, its dysfunction is stabilized by spurious logic of nihilism. Some stuck there may be barely capable of everyday functioning. Others manage better, by recognizing the limits of rationality while continuing to use it effectively in practice.

The stages of individual development are manifest also in forms of social organization. Pre-rational psychology is typical of pre-modern societies—what I’ve described elsewhere as the “choiceless” or “communal” mode. Rationality is characteristic of systematic, modern societies. Postmodernity corresponds to the 4.5 breakdown.

Postmodernism sabotages the bridge to rationality

In the 1970s and 1980s, the best postmodern/poststructural thinkers presented meta-rational views, based on their thorough understanding of systematic rationality.1 This first generation of postmodern teachers had a complete “classical education” in the humanities; they mastered the Western intellectual tradition before coming to understand its limitations.

Deconstructive postmodernism, their critique of stage 4 modernism/systematicity/rationality, is the basis of the contemporary university humanities curriculum. This is a disaster. The critique is largely correct; but, as Kegan observed, to teach it to young adults is harmful.2 Few university students have consolidated rationality. Essentially none are ready to move beyond it. Pointing out its defects makes their developmental task more difficult.

You cannot understand what is wrong with rationalism until you are capable of being rational. You cannot go beyond rationality until after you can use it reliably. You cannot become meta to systems you do not appreciate and do not understand how to deploy. You cannot move from stage 3 to stage 5 without passing through stage 4.

In fact, even most teachers of postmodern theory don’t understand it. Unfortunately, the postmodern pioneers chose to write in obfuscatory riddles. Their insights were difficult enough to understand without that. Few followers could extract the insights. Most teachers are second-generation professors who didn’t understand pomo when it was new, and third-generation ones who were mainly taught dumbed-down second-generation “pseudo-pomo.”

They were never taught to think, and can’t. What they learned was to imitate the founders’ appalling rhetorical style. They even learned to not think—because thinking would lead to questioning the nonsense, which would get you ejected from pomodom. Consequently, most contemporary pomo writing is—as everyone admits—incoherent blather, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That’s “pseudo-pomo.”

At this point, many humanities professors cannot take even a rational, stage 4 stance; they were not taught to think. Lacking that, they cannot critique rationalism accurately. They could not possibly transmit stage 5 meta-rationality to their students now.

“All systems must be destroyed”

Still worse, pseudo-pomo misunderstands the postmodern critique simply as “all systems are wicked, false ideologies invented by the powerful as means of oppression, and must be destroyed.”3

Unfortunately, “critical theory” has so far failed to produce a broad, positive, clear and practical meta-rational vision. With nothing beyond the discredited stage 4 to look forward to, it is mostly no longer possible for humanities majors to develop a rational, systematic self. Nor can they participate effectively in a rational, systematic culture and society. At best, if they do somehow make it to stage 4, deconstructive postmodernism can only push them on into the ultra-relativist nihilism of 4.5. In that abyss, you realize rationality is not the answer, but can see no alternative. There is essentially no support available for the further transition to stage 5.4

This scares me. Up until the 1980s, a university humanities department did teach you how to think—and it was the standard education for the ruling class. Since then, it has taught you not to think. What happens as people trained in postmodern anti-thought move increasingly into positions of power? Without an appreciation for administrative and technical rationality—much less the ability to deploy them personally—how can they lead governments, corporations, universities, churches, or NGOs?

Recently, major institutions seem increasingly willing to abandon systemic logic: rationality, rule of law, and procedural justice. Such systems lost credibility decades ago, and are under increasing cultural/political attack from the pomo-educated. But for now they are critical to maintaining civilization. Someone has to keep the machinery running. Until we can build a fluid↗︎︎, meta-rational stage 5 society, destroying stage 4 institutions means everyone will die. (Not to be alarmist or anything.)

Building a bridge to stage 5 may be critical to keeping the bridge to stage 4 open. Because the postmodern critique is correct, it’s intellectually indefensible to insist on rationality as The Way and The Truth and The Light. To make stage 4 palatable, it has to be clear that it is not the final destination. Confirming the accuracy of the critique opens the possibility of a third alternative to the stage 3 and 4 worldviews. Saying:

  • “You are right, systems are not ultimately workable as the basis for society and culture” and
  • “You are right, systems do always get appropriated by the powerful as means of oppression”

makes credible:

  • “Psychologically, understanding rational systems is a stage you need to go through to get beyond them” and
  • “However imperfect, systems are the main way we currently know how to deliver the material and social prerequisites for life, so we need to keep them running for now.”

Misperception of woo blocks the bridge beyond rationality

STEM5 education teaches the value of technical systems, including formal rationality. STEM education ignores postmodernism, so the bridge to stage 4 is still intact there. Thus, stage 5 meta-rationality is now probably more accessible for STEM folks than other people. I think it is important to present stage 5 in language STEM folks can understand and will find attractive.

For people in stage 4, anything that is not rational may sound like simple irrationality, or magical thinking, and so they are likely to reject it. As a further difficulty, stage 5 has some specific commonalities with stage 3 (pre-rationality), making it harder to distinguish. Dualism↗︎︎—insistence on precise boundaries—is characteristic of stage 4. Monism↗︎︎—rejection of boundaries, and over-emphasis on connections—is characteristic of stage 3. Stage 5 recognizes that boundaries and connections are both nebulous↗︎︎ and patterned↗︎︎, so it is neither monist nor dualist. However, from a rationalist point of view, meta-rationalism’s rejection of black-and-white thinking just looks like the blooming buzzing confusion of stage 3 monism, which rationalism is right to reject.

For someone in stage 4, relativizing the ultimate value of rationality seems certain to slide into Romanticism (prioritizing emotions and subjective experience over objective understanding) and woo (supernaturalism, pseudoscience, and wishful thinking). Since nearly all talk about limits to rationality is motivated by stage 3 Romanticism and woo, this is an inevitable misapprehension. However, that is not the stage 5 agenda. This must be made extremely clear.

My summary↗︎︎ of Kegan’s theory included a point that merited only a footnote there, but which I want to emphasize here:

Stages 3 and 5 both tolerate contradictions, but of different types and in different ways.

Stage 3 does not feel a need for rational justifications, and mostly doesn’t have the capacity to use them; so it mostly doesn’t even notice logical contradictions, and isn’t bothered by them when it does. However, stage 3 can be highly intolerant of contradictory value judgments, because they threaten community harmony.

Stage 4 finds contradictions within its system a fundamental problem, and tries to eliminate them one way or another. Eventually, if contradictions cannot be eliminated from the system, it must be replaced. Stage 4 wants to find the right system, and if two contradict, that shows one is wrong.

Stage 5 recognizes the value of sorting out contradictions within a system, and retains stage 4’s ability to do so. However, it doesn’t expect any system to work perfectly, so it tolerates internal contradictions if they appear relatively unproblematic. Stage 5 entertains multiple systems, and is comfortable with contradictions between them, because systems are not absolute truths, only ways-of-seeing that are useful in different circumstances. Stage 5 is uniquely comfortable with value conflicts, since (unlike both 3 and 4) it does not take any value as ultimate.

Emanuel Rylke commented↗︎︎, perceptively:

You say “People in stage 3 tend to misunderstand stage 4 as being stage 2” and hint at the possibility for a similar error at stage 4: “3 and 5 both tolerate contradictions” (I myself got hung up on this superficial similarity for multiple years). I think that’s not just a coincidence but a reason for why we can make a reliable distinction between these stages in the first place. If you view cognitive development as a river then sections where progress lies in a direction that looks backwards create a sort of reservoir. Basically there progress is counter intuitive so people slow down a lot and pile up. These then can more easily recognized as separate stages compared to a continuously flowing river.

For stage 4, stage 5’s tolerance of contradiction is indistinguishable from stage 3’s; both appear simply irrational.6

Lacking a clear presentation of stage 5, and particularly a clear explanation of how it differs from stage 3, it is inaccessible from stage 4 directly. At best, one can only reach it from 4.5, the gap of nihilistic despair. This generally provokes anxiety, rage, and depression, and is not a good place to get stuck.

And, little or no support is available for the 4.5 to 5 transition. Mostly you can only get to stage 5 through a rare combination of luck, intelligence, and endurance.

The nihilistic gap, STEM depression, and postrationalism

Many of the people I care about most, and find most interesting, are STEM-educated refugees from ideological rationalism. They’ve mastered rationality, they’ve seen through it—and many now are stuck. Systems cannot provide them with meaning; but neither, it seems can anything else. Many fall into crippling nihilistic depression—a characteristic of stage 4.5. This is awful.

4.5 is necessary en route to stage 5, but maybe it doesn’t need to be so horrible. One needs to become disillusioned and disappointed with rationalism, and then angry at it, and perhaps temporarily reject it altogether (in theory at least). Moving beyond any of the developmental stages involves a profound sense of loss: of one’s previously comfortable mode of making meaning. One’s meaning-making mode is always experienced as “the self,” and the new mode seems frighteningly alien—even though it is more powerful once mastered. The 4-to–5 transition is particularly difficult, as it appears no new meaning is possible even in principle, which implies you are nothing, and have no value.

However, if you understand that meaning re-emerges at stage 5—or can accept this, based on plausible testimony—then you need not descend into despair.

Recently, there has been an exodus from the rationalist movement, and some exiles have loosely grouped under the banner of “postrationalism.” (For an informal review, see Darcey Riley’s 2014 post↗︎︎ and the reader comments on it. More recent contributions are from Sarah Perry↗︎︎ and Warg Franklin↗︎︎.) Postrationalism is an early work-in-progress, whose meaning is as yet unclear, but seems to have much in common with Kegan’s stage 5, and with the complete stance↗︎︎ as I describe it in Meaningness.

(I’m a little wary of the term “postrational,” because it might be misunderstood as a rejection of rationality, in favor of something irrational. That describes stage 3 Romanticism. Kegan’s stage 5, the complete stance, and—so far as I understand it—postrationalism do not abandon rationality. They deploy rationality as a miscellaneous collection of oft-useful tools, rather than The Single Correct Way To Do Everything. I’m using “meta-rational”—just in this post, so far—as an experimental alternative, meant to suggest that. However, the problem with “meta-rational” is that it may be misunderstood as “applying systematic rationality to itself.” That is not stage 5; it’s just an extra-fancy version of stage 4. Elsewhere I am using the word “fluid↗︎︎”; I’m not sure whether that’s better.)

The current adult developmental landscape

This diagram summarizes past, current, and potential future ways beyond stage 3. Dotted lines show routes that are mainly unavailable, and dotted boxes are stages that are mainly unavailable.

↗︎︎
Click to embiggen

(This is a good time to remember that adult developmental theory is a conceptual model, not Eternal Truth. Like all models, it highlights and partially explains some phenomena, and marginalizes and distorts others. I am using it here because it provides a useful vocabulary for discussing some patterns↗︎︎ I want to point out.)

Twenty-some years ago, Kegan said that the bridge into stage 4 was through participation in a systematic institution: either employment or university education.

Employers such as large corporations and the military induct young adults into bureaucratic rationality. This bridge is still open. However, it seems increasingly under cultural-political attack. Further, it has never led beyond stage 4. Stage 5 institutions are rare, transient, and perhaps entirely hypothetical.7

“Pseudo-pomo” now stands in the way of a systematic humanities education. It is probably still possible to reach stage 4 in some English departments, but you’d have to be smart, lucky, dedicated, and discreet—so I’ve made that a dotted box in the diagram. If you do reach it, the genuine pomo critique is still available; I’ve drawn it with a solid line. However, the critique leads only to ultra-relativistic nihilism. The logical next step, a positive non-eternalist↗︎︎ stage 5 cultural and social vision, does not yet exist. (I do plan to try to sketch one in Meaningness and Time—but that’s not what this post is about.)

Formal rationality is central in STEM education, so it’s now the best route to stage 4. STEM departments do not explicitly go beyond that. However, at least some professors understand the limitations of formal methods and the inherent nebulosity of their subject matter, and may teach that informally. They may also teach some stage 5 cognitive skills informally, implicitly, or by example.

Some STEM people figure out the limits of rationalist ideology on their own. Lacking any intellectual or social framework for that, the discovery often leads to nihilistic despair and social isolation. This is common enough that I’ve given that box a solid border. “Postrationalism” is, perhaps, the dawning of a conceptual structure and social support network for moving beyond it.

A bridge to stage 5 for STEM people

So, I really want to help. I care particularly for the STEM-educated who are lost in the nihilist abyss.

But also, STEM people are the most likely to have made it beyond stage 4, and therefore the most likely to be able to reach stage 5. With stage 4 discredited, getting a critical mass of people to stage 5 may be the only way to preserve civilization from systemic collapse. That could be brought on by broad cultural, social, and psychological reversion to stage 3 tribalism. (Not to be alarmist or anything.)

Stage 5 may contain the answers to current pressing social and cultural problems (as I’ll eventually argue in Meaningness and Time). But perhaps even more critically, building the bridge from 4 to 5 may be the only way to keep the bridge from 3 to 4 open. (And to repair the bridge to rationality for non-STEM people.)

Stage transitions usually cannot be accomplished solo. Intellectual understanding is not enough. A bridge needs a culture and community that help in three ways. They should challenge current-stage behavior to push you toward the next; they should support you during the transition, to minimize negative consequences when you are halfway through and can’t quite make the next stage work; they should confirm (praise and reward) next-stage behavior to the extent you can do it. Systematic institutions, ideally, provide these for new members, transitioning from stage 3 to 4.

Cultural and community context for the 4-to–5 transition has, thus far, been rare. The meta-rational mode is not broadly recognized. Context for reaching it has been created only rarely, idiosyncratically, by exceptional individual mentors, plus their circle of students. I’m probably not in a position to do that currently. I can probably best contribute through mere explanation. Alas, that is radically inadequate. Maybe it is better than nothing, though.

Each developmental stage can be explained in terms of any aspect of human being. Kegan discusses the 4-to–5 transition in terms of ethics, marriage relationships, and management style. These are not areas that STEM folks are typically particularly interested in. It may be more helpful to explain in terms of cognitive, or epistemological, approaches. Cognition and epistemology are central in Kegan’s model overall, but he’s vague on how they change in the 4-to–5 transition.

Perhaps this is one place I can help.8 Challenge, here, entails explaining the limitations of rationality; support means showing how meta-rationality works, and how to make the transition emotionally feasible; confirmation is pointing out the power of meta-rationality. Meaningness, the book, is supposed to do all three of these, eventually. In fact, it might be described overall as guide to the transition from stage 4 eternalism↗︎︎ through 4.5 nihilism to stage 5—the complete stance↗︎︎. (However, the book is mostly an enormous collection of IOUs, so far!)

[I wrote what follows below in early 2016. Since then I have been writing a book about meta-rationality, In the Cells of the Eggplant, which aims to fulfill the suggestions I made here. Progress has been slow due to circumstances; as of late 2019 I'm hoping for publication in mid-2020.]

This book section explains how rationality fails when you try to make it do too much. It’s quite incomplete, and there isn’t even a good overview yet. I’ve also addressed the issue, obliquely, in several metablog posts; and it will also appear in other parts of the book, for example this page.

To be honest, I’m not altogether enthusiastic about writing these bits. The issues have actually been understood pretty well for most of a century. So I’m impatient. I’m like “come on, you can’t really believe anything that dumb, can you!”, which is not a helpful approach.9 Unfortunately, no one else has taken the time to explain the problems clearly and carefully in straightforward language, so far as I know. The discussion is scattered across a dozen disciplines, written in the distinctive academic codes of each. Summarizing this will—or would—be a public service; but not as much fun as I would like.

Anyway, one way or another, many people do figure this out, but get stuck at stage 4.5, so maybe it’s not as important to challenge rationality (from a stage 5 perspective) as to help build the 4.5-to–5 bridge.

As support for that route, I plan to explain in more detail why nihilism is wrong, and to offer antidotes to its emotional pitfalls. Some of this I have drafted in detail, and I’d like to complete those parts soon. (In terms of priorities, I have been torn between working on that and on “The history of meaningness,” which I hope is relevant to some current political dilemmas.)

Cognitive support, and confirmation, mean showing clearly that meta-rational cognition is possible and valuable. “How to Think Real Good” may be a start, although this was not how I thought of its purpose when I wrote it. There’s vastly more to say on this subject.

Even if all that were completed, it would fall far short of building a bridge—because that requires a social and cultural context. Can such a thing exist? I am confident it can. It will take collaborative construction by many contributors, though.

  • 1. Michel Foucault was, in my opinion, the foremost among them. Unfortunately, his premature death prevented what might have become a complete meta-rational presentation. His last work—the multi-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality↗︎︎—is the best. It’s only incidentally about sexuality; it’s about self and society, knowledge and power, language and experience.
  • 2. This is in the final chapter of his In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life↗︎︎, “On being good company for the wrong journey.” The “wrong” journey is that from stage 4 to 5, which he thought almost no university student was ready for.
  • 3. Kegan pointed out that although campus identity politics is usually presented in pseudo-pomo terms, it could also function as an intuitive attempt to move toward stage 4 from stage 3. The structure of the identity-political ideology is itself a system, which may be a helpful support for some students in forming a coherent, systematic self—an identity. That was in his 1994 In Over Our Heads↗︎︎ (pp. 337–338, 342–344, 347). Unfortunately, I suspect that using identity politics as a bridge to stage 4 was more feasible in the early ’90s, at the height of the subcultural mode, than it is now in the atomized mode. Identity politics then retained considerable conceptual coherence from its Marxist roots; but it has become increasingly incoherent. Identity gave way to intersectionalism—in a way consistent with the development from the subcultural to the atomized mode—and that is probably still less capable of leading anyone beyond stage 3.
  • 4. See, however, Kegan’s discussion of destructive antimodernism (4.5) vs. reconstructive postmodernism (stage 5), in In Over Our Heads↗︎︎, pp. 324–334. This is about as clear a statement of the way forward, within the critical theory framework, as has been written to date, to my knowledge.
  • 5. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
  • 6. This is structurally identical to Ken Wilber’s idea of the pre-rational/trans-rational fallacy↗︎︎, which also draws on adult developmental psychology. I am skeptical of his “trans-rational,” however; it seems to be mostly Romantic monism, which I think is actually anti-rational (and wrong and harmful).
  • 7. In recent work, Kegan has developed a theory and practice for stage 5 institutions. I wrote about this in “The Cofounders.”
  • 8. With the caveat that, unlike Kegan, I’m not an empirical psychologist, so anything novel I say can only be guessing.
  • 9.Pop Bayesianism: cruder than I thought?” particularly suffered from this problem. I followed up, eventually, with “Probability theory does not extend logic,” which is very patient and properly pedagogical. (Until the second appendix, anyway.) It was a drag to write, and I kept promising it for years before finally finishing. When I did, the people who already understood the issues nodded their heads and said “yes, of course,” and the people who were committed to Bayesian rationalism ignored it.

Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity

Grocery shopping by bicycle
Grocery shopping by bicycle: image courtesy↗︎︎ David Ing

I have intense mixed feelings about this:

E is the letter in today’s sciences of mind. E adjectives proliferate. Nowadays it is hard to avoid claims that cognition – perceiving, imagining, decision-making, planning and so on – is best understood in E terms. The list is long, including: embodied, enactive, extended, embedded, ecological, engaged, emotional, expressive, emergent and so on.

E-approaches propose that cognition depends on embodied engagements in the world. They rethink the alternative, ‘sandwich’ view of cognition as something pure that can be logically isolated from non-neural activity. Traditionally, cognition is imagined to occur wholly within the brain. It occurs tidily in-between perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs. Cognition is informed by, and shapes, non-neural bodily engagements, but cognition and embodied interactions never mix.

A wealth of empirical findings has motivated various challenges to this traditional view. Experimental work encourages the idea that cognition may depend more strongly and pervasively on embodied activity than was previously supposed. Cognition may depend to a considerable extent and might even be constituted by the ways and means that cognizers actively and dynamically interact and engage with the world and others over time.

Those are the opening paragraphs of an excellent 2015 summary article, “How Embodied Is Cognition?↗︎︎”.1

I wrote a practically identical paper in 1986 with Phil Agre, “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity.”2 I can’t find it on the web, so I’ve included the full text below.

Old Man Yells At Cloud↗︎︎: “Goddammit, I told you so thirty years ago!” But you don’t care about that.

Rather, these ideas matter now: as a conception of what human beings are, and what we can potentially be, which is radically different from the mainstream philosophical tradition. If they are right, they have significant implications for how society, culture, and our selves may develop in the near future. That is what I now call “the fluid mode.” I plan to write about this connection soon, and will refer back to this paper then.

My mixed feelings: I’m glad that, thirty years later, these ideas are getting much better known. I’m annoyed that cognitive “science”—a mistaken, unscientific ideology of meaningness↗︎︎—has continued to exert a harmful, distorting influence on our understanding of ourselves in the meantime. I will say a little about that in an afterword at the end of this web page.

First, though, the paper. Here it is, verbatim, except I reformatted the footnotes. Also, I’ve included some minor commentary in the body of the paper, in [square brackets and italics].

Abstract

We believe that abstract reasoning is not primitive, but derived phenomenologically, developmentally, and implementationally from concrete activity. We summarize recent advances in the understanding of the mechanisms of concrete activity which suggest paths for exploring the emergence of abstract reasoning therefrom.

We argue that abstract reasoning is made from the same building blocks as concrete activity, and consists of techniques for alleviating the limitations of innate hardware. These techniques are formed by the internalization of patterns of interaction between an agent and the world. Internalization makes it possible to represent the self, and so to reflect upon the relationship between the self and the world. Most patterns of abstract thought originate in the culture. We believe that ideas such as plans, knowledge, complexity, understanding, order, search, and forgetting are learned. We present examples of everyday planning and analyze them in this framework. Finally, we describe cognitive cliches, which we take to be the most abstract mental structures.

Program

We want to understand the emergence of abstract reasoning from concrete activity. We believe that abstract reasoning is not innate, but derived from concrete activity, in three senses: phenomenologically, developmentally, and implementationally. We hope that an understanding of the first two senses can guide the development of an understanding of the third.

Heidegger argues that the phenomenologically primordial way of being is involvement in a concrete activity.3 Everyday activity consists in the use of equipment for a specific reason. When this activity is going well, it is “transparent.” An experienced driver does not have to think about driving, he just does it; and he can be doing something else, possibly requiring abstract thought, at the same time. It is only when there is a breakdown in the activity that abstract thought is needed. Only when I have too many things to do do I need to make a plan or schedule, to wonder what order to do them in, how they can be most efficiently combined. And it is only when that too fails that I might give up, become curious, and reflect theoretically about scheduling algorithms.

Several branches of psychology suggest that abstract reasoning appears developmentally later in individuals than involvement in concrete activity. Jean Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development traces development from the beginning of infancy, in which there are only blind stimulus/response reflexes with no abstraction, representation, or reasoning.4 “Formal operations”—fully abstract reasoning—appear only around puberty. Psychoanalytic developmental psychology (particularly object-relations theory as found in D. W. Winnicott) sees the infant as a chaotic mass of impulses and fantasies leading directly to action.5 The infant has no self-representation and so is undifferentiated from the world. Gradually, scattered mental elements are integrated to produce adult rational thought. Crucial to the process of integration is internalization: getting control over interactions with the environment by bringing them inside yourself. Internalization leads to decreased egocentricity. By representing the relationship between his self and the world, a person is better able to be detached from it. Detachment is never complete; the ability to distinguish self from other, fantasy from reality, continues to develop throughout life.

[The following paragraph did not appear in the published version of the paper. I’ve derived this web version from the LaTeX source file, which includes notes to myself and some deleted material. A note here says I removed it as “anthropologically controversial.” I’m not sure whether the substance is still anthropologically controversial. The word “primitive” is probably politically incorrect, though.]

There is another way in which abstract reasoning is developmentally derived from concrete activity. Abstract reasoning may be a historically recent development, and culturally specific. People in primitive cultures do not engage in such reasoning, at least not to the same extent and not in as sophisticated ways.

The third sense in which we believe abstract reasoning is derived is implementationally. Constructivism is the position, held by many developmental psychologists, that human development occurs roughly in stages, and that each stage is built upon the previous one. We believe that abstract reasoning appears late because it is emergent from, or parasitic upon, concrete activity. We want to understand the nature of this emergence relationship. How, even in principle, can abstract thought be mechanistically derived from simple action?

Concrete activity

Study of the emergence of abstract reasoning must begin with an understanding of concrete activity. We believe that the beginnings of such an understanding are found in Gary Drescher’s work on the machinery to implement infant sensorimotor learning and in Agre’s work on that needed to implement adult routine activity.

Agre’s theory of routine activity describes adult action when everything is going well: the fluent, regular, practiced, unproblematic activity that makes up most of everyday life.6

The theory includes an account of the innate hardware, which we believe is, loosely, connectionist. It also includes a description of the sorts of cognition and activity that are most appropriate to that hardware. It turns out that the sort of computation most appropriate to the hardware is also the primary sort of computation that actually transpires in everyday life, namely concrete activity.

Routine activity is situated↗︎︎: it makes extensive use of the immediate surrounds and their accessibility for observation and interaction. Rather than using internal datastructures to model the world, the world is immediately accessed through perception. Much of the theory is concerned with the emergence of routines, which are dynamics of interaction: patterns of activity that occur not as a result of their representation in the head of the agent, but due to a Simon’s-ant7 relationship to a complex environment. The world and the mind interpenetrate.8 Routine activity is conducted in a society of other people, who provide a variety of types of support, from helping when asked to transmitting cultural techniques for solving classes of problems. Routine activity is concerned with the here-and-now; it rarely requires planning into the future, reflection upon the past, or consideration of spatially distant causes. It rarely involves thinking new thoughts; for the most part existing patterns of activity suffice to cope with the situation. Finally, routine activity takes the forms most natural to the hardware: those that can be implemented efficiently on a connectionist architecture.

The architecture we propose to support routine activity consists of a very large number of simple processors. The connectivity of the processors is quasi-static, meaning that the cost of creating a new connection between processors is very high relative to that of using an existing connection. The connections pass tokens from a small set of values, rather than real-valued weights, as in most connectionist learning schemes.

Such an architecture can represent abstract propositions, if at all, only by adding a layer of interpretation which is very computationally expensive. We think that indexical-functional representations are used instead. These are fully indexical representations which can be evaluated relative to the current situation very cheaply by virtue of their grounding in sensorimotor primitives. They can be thought of as definite noun phrases: an indexical-functional representation picks out, for example, the cereal box or the tea strainer from the visual field. The indexicality of such representations is mostly a matter of egocentricity. The cereal box implicitly means the cereal box in front of me. Compare developmental psychology’s description of child thought as egocentric.

Indexical-functional representations can’t involve logical individuals or variables; the hardware cannot reason about identity. Traditional AI representations use variables which are bound to constants which in turn are somehow connected by the sensory system to objects in the real world. Each constant is connected to a distinct real world object. So, for example, we can say that all bowls are containers, and instantiate this on bowl-259. If the bowl-259 is seen later, it will be recognized as the same one. For indexical-functional representations, things that look the same are the same. All you can do is see if there is a bowl there or not. There is no way to represent permanent objects in Piaget’s sense.

Another consequence of quasi-static connectivity is that introspection is very expensive: you can’t examine your own datastructures unless you built them with extra connections and processing elements for the purpose.

The theory of routines is incomplete; it describes adult mental architecture without explaining how that architecture came about. Drescher gives a theory of sensorimotor development motivated to fine levels of detail by Piaget’s observations of the early stages of infant development.9 He proposes hardware to support the emergence of the necessary software to account for the first five stages.

Drescher’s architecture, the Schema Mechanism, is quasi-static. It consists of very large numbers of items and schemas, which respectively represent properties of the world and the effects of actions in situations. Items are boolean-valued representations of conditions in the world. Schemas are indexical assertions that if certain items hold, after a given action other items will hold. The architecture initially has only sensory primitives as items and no schemas. Various learning techniques create new schemas to represent observed regularities, compound procedures for achieving states of items, and synthetic items, which represent conditions in the world which are not immediately observable. Some of these techniques collect empirical statistics to discover correlations. Implementation of the architecture is in progress.

Drescher presents a hypothetical scenario of his architecture progressing through the first five stages of infant development. Initially, all the representations constructed are purely indexical, but eventually these are partly deindexicalized, so that there develop representations of objects independent of the sensory mode in which they are perceived and then of objects independent of whether they are seen. Similarly, actions are initially represented egocentrically, but come to be represented independent of the actor who performs them.

The emergence of abstract reasoning

Abstract reasoning uses abstract representations and performs detached search-like computations.

Abstract representations differ from concrete indexical-functional representations along several dimensions, and intermediates are possible. They are universally quantified and so capture eternal truths, independent of the current situation. They are general purpose: a very broad range of sorts of knowledge can be encoded in a uniform framework. They can involve variables which must be instantiated in use; this requires notions of identity and difference. They are compositional: sentence-like, in that the meaning of the whole depends on the meanings of the parts. Natural language spans the range from indexical-functional to abstract. Utterances such as “the big one!” (requesting a coworker to pass a hammer) encode indexical-functional representations; those such as “Everyone hates the phone company” are abstract.

By detached computation, we mean that the agent, presented with a situation and a goal, thinks hard about how to achieve the goal, develops a plan, and then executes the plan without much additional thought. Because the agent is detached from the world, he can not depend on clues in the world to tell him what to do, and he must reason about hypothetical future situations, rather than simply inspecting the current state of the world. Any sort of search in an internally represented state-space is a detached computation.

We believe that abstract reasoning uses the same hardware as concrete activity. It is computationally expensive (in general, and particularly on quasi-static hardware), and since it is not necessary for routine activity, it is resorted to only when routines break down, when reflection or problem-solving are required. Thus, we believe that abstract reasoning is perforated: it is not a coherent module that systematically accounts for all or even a class of mental phenomena. It is not a general-purpose reasoning machine, as it appears to be, but only a patchwork of special cases. (Later in the paper, we sketch a general theory of special cases.) It appears seamless because people are good at giving post-hoc rationalizations for their actions, but those rationalizations are not causally connected to the activity they purport to explain. Techniques are often abstract by virtue of depending only on the form, not the content, of the concrete problems they apply to.

We believe that abstract reasoning consists of a set of techniques, mostly culturally transmitted, for alleviating the limitations of quasi-static hardware to constrain the ways one organizes one’s activity. These techniques are implemented with the same building blocks used in routine activity, but interconnected in different ways, which generally run slowly and consume much hardware. The techniques mostly act to build static networks to routinely cope with some new type of situation: they compile abstract knowledge into machinery for concrete activity. This is similar to chunking in Soar,10 the use of a dependency network in Agre’s running arguments,11 the instantiation of virtual structures in the Schema Mechanism, and Jeff Shrager’s mediation theory.12

Though abstract reasoning is emergent from computation, there is no reason a priori to suppose that it is also computational. The nature of a system can change radically across an emergent-implementation boundary. For example, from quantum mechanics there emerge chemical systems, which are not quantum mechanical; from chemistry there emerge biological systems, which are not chemical; from biological and from electronic systems there emerge computational systems, which are not biological or electronic. In each of these cases, when we say that a a system is not of a certain sort, we mean that it is best described in other terms. A program can be reduced to a pattern of electrical impulses, but the only way it can be reasoned about in that framework is by blind simulation. Programs participate in emergent rules that allow us to reason about them efficiently and independently of their hardware implementation. We will not be surprised if the mind is similarly made of a stuff that is not computational, though it emerges from a computational medium. Psychoanalysis and anthropology, to name just two disciplines, have made sophisticated but entirely non-computational models of mind-stuff.

[The preceding paragraph did not appear in the published paper. My note to myself was “I got too much flak about this”—from readers of draft versions. I guess I’ll be surprised if I don’t get flak again now.]

Internalization

The content of routine activity is not innate; it must be learned. The Schema Mechanism provides one account of this development; we don’t know if it is sufficient. But apart from the hardware required, we can study the dynamics of skill acquisition: in what way is it learned?

The problem is in a way more difficult than earlier approaches such as Sussman’s13 suggest, because most interesting activity arises not from the execution of plans, which are accessible datastructures, but from interactional routines, which do not derive from explicit representations. You can, and typically do, participate in a routine without being aware of it. So the first step of improving a routine is to make some aspect of it explicit. As each new aspect of a routine is represented, it can be modified. This process rarely terminates in a complete procedural representation.

The making explicit of routines is a good candidate for the mechanistic correlate of the psychoanalytic concept of internalization. Agre’s “Routines” gives this example of internalizing a routine:

An everyday example is provided by the myopic vacuumer of dining rooms who hasn’t thought to describe the process as one of alternating between vacuuming and furniture-moving. Explicitly representing that aspect of the vacuuming process should make one think to move all the furniture before getting started…. Vacuuming is often best characterized as interleaving the processes of moving the furniture, running the vacuum around, and returning the furniture. Sometimes it is better to deinterleave these processes.

We don’t know how internalization happens in general. For lack of a better idea, we reluctantly suspect that a brute-force statistical induction engine is involved. However, something like Dan Weld’s aggregation would be very useful in detecting loops such as the vacuuming one.14 Unfortunately, known aggregation algorithms do not scale well with the complexity of the input, and probably will fail in the face of the richness of the real world.

A strong clue that a cyclic process is occurring is a rhythm. The Schema Mechanism can be extended with hardware for rhythm detection. Add to each item hardware which keeps a history of the last several changes in value of the item and computes the variance of the Δt. If the variance is small, a synthetic item can be created to represent the rhythmicity of the given one, and the state of the synthetic item can be maintained in hardware. These synthetic rhythm items themselves can have rhythm detectors, so that more complex rhythms can be detected. How useful such hardware would be remains to be seen.

One result of internalization is the construction of the mind’s eye. Imagine that parts of the central system can gain write access to the wires on which the outputs of sensory systems, at various levels of abstraction, are delivered to the central system. Then one part of the central system can induce hallucinations, and another part will do something based on what it implicitly supposes are inputs from the world. In order to avoid actually acting in the imaginary situation, it must also be possible to short-circuit outputs to the motor system. In this way, the ability to consider hypothetical situations begins. If the situation is well-enough understood, the results of imaginary actions can be hallucinated. Iterated, this permits the internalization of routines. The resulting internal representation of a routine is another routine which simulates it, interacting with the sensorimotor interface, rather than the real world. This is, we think, the mechanistic correlate of the introspective phenomenon of visual imagery. The mind’s eye extends to all sensory modalities and to motor actions. Constructed similarly is the internal dialog, the sentences we say to ourselves silently. Computation in this internal world is just like computation in the real one; it is just as concrete and situated, except that the situation is imaginary.

We suspect that early language acquisition is intimately tied up with the first development of abstract thought. Natural language provides a bridge between indexical-functional and abstract representations. Children’s first utterances are single words: “ball!” “Mummy!” “hungry!” The production of these highly-indexical “observatives” might very well be directly driven by indexical-functional representations. There follows a long two-word stage, producing utterances like “give ball,” “more cookie,” and “bad kitty.” There is no real syntax to these utterances, but there are a dozen or so different kinds of semantic relationships between the two words to be mastered.15 The compositionality makes even such simple sentences less than fully indexical. Production of such utterances both requires and drives the development of abstract thought.

Reflection and the self

Brian Smith, in “Varieties of Self-Reference↗︎︎,”16 makes a useful distinction between introspection (thinking about yourself by virtue of having access to your own datastructures) and reflection (thinking about the relationship between yourself and the world). Introspection has traditionally been thought necessary for reflection.

The construction of the mind’s eye gives you partial introspective access in a systematic way. You can observe what you would do in hypothetical situations, but without access to the machinery that engenders the action, you won’t know quite how or why. By varying the imaginary situation, you can induce a model of your own reasoning. This model, however, can only be as good as your ability to simulate the world’s responses to your actions, and so must constantly be checked against experience.

Routine activity does not require reflection; the necessary computation just runs. Moreover, quasi-static hardware makes introspection very expensive. We suspect, therefore, that reflection is not only not used in concrete activity, but also is little used in problem solving. It is primarily useful in long-term development: a relatively crude self-model may be good enough to base long-term planning on. This is compatible with the psychoanalytic understanding of self-models, used in determining basic values and orientations, incomplete, inexact, and in pathological cases completely unlike the self that is modeled.

We believe that reflection, rather than being based on introspection, primarily “goes out through the world.” Just as concrete activity generally uses the real world as the model of the world, so reflection uses the world’s mirroring of the self as a model of the self. Smith gives the example of realizing that he is being foolishly repetitive at a dinner party and shutting up. Such a realization might possibly be made by examining one’s own actions, but might much more likely be cued by signs of boredom on the part of the audience. This again is consonant with psychoanalytic emphasis on the role of the mother in mirroring the infant’s facial expressions and gestures and, in later life, the role of the reactions of others in maintaining self-esteem.

Smith is concerned in “Varieties” with translation between the indexical representations needed for concrete activity and the abstract representations needed for reflection. He proposes the use of the self-model as a pivot in this translation. Deindexicalization consists in part in filling in implicit extra arguments to relations with the self. Thus, to take Smith’s example, the sensory item hungry can be used concretely to activate eating goals. But to reason about other people’s hunger, it must be deindexicalized to (hungry me), generalized to (hungry x), and perhaps instantiated as (hungry bear). Similarly, only by deindexicalizing the cereal box representation can cereal boxes in general, or cereal boxes remote in time or space, be considered.

Cognitive ideology; planning

The nature of abstract thought, unlike that of concrete activity, is determined by your culture. (The content of concrete activity is of course also culturally determined, but its form is determined by the innate hardware.) We use the term cognitive ideology to refer to culturally transmitted ways of organizing activity that involve ideas such as plans, knowledge, complexity, understanding, order, search, and forgetting.

We would like to provide an account of planning, an item of cognitive ideology, as a paradigm form of the sort of abstract reasoning we have sketched above. “AI and Everyday Life”17 argues that very little planning is done in daily life, and that such plans as are constructed are only skeletal, never more than a dozen steps. The latter is a good thing, because Planning for Conjunctive Goals18 shows that planning, even in the trivial sorts of domains considered in the AI literature, is computationally intractable.

The remainder of this section presents first-person anecdotes from the daily life of one of us (Chapman). These anecdotes illustrate sorts of activity that are not well accounted for by current AI planning theories and which must be explained either in giving a psychologically realistic account of human activity or in building a robot that acts in real-world domains. Our partial analyses hint at the form an account of planning in the framework of this paper might take.

Classical planning emphasized the means-ends relationship between plan steps and the discovery of order constraints among them based on interactions between pre- and postconditions. Observation of everyday planning leads us to believe that these sorts of reasoning are unusual. In general, the right way to achieve a goal is obvious. Pre- and postconditions are unknown, variable, too hard to represent accurately, or out of the agent’s control. Ordering decisions are generally made for quite other reasons.

When Planning for Conjunctive Goals was printed, I sent about sixty copies out to people who had asked for them. I set up an assembly line for putting copies in envelopes and addressing them. The Tyvek envelopes I use have gummed flaps with waxpaper over them; to make them sticky, you pull off the waxpaper, rather than licking the glue. So I pulled the waxpaper off an envelope, shoved a copy of the report in, and sealed the flap. The second time I tried, the glue stuck to the back of the report as it slid half-way in. I had to tear the report away from the flap, damaging both somewhat, and seal the envelope with tape. From then on, I put the reports in before pulling off the waxpaper. In this example, the two steps must be ordered, but it is hard to give an account of the reason in terms of preconditions. You could say that it’s a precondition for putting reports in envelopes that the flap not be sticky, but that isn’t really true; you can still do it if you’re lucky or careful. Such a precondition seems artificial, because it doesn’t tell you why you have to put the report in first. In any case, if there were such a precondition, I didn’t know about it when I started, though I think I had a pretty complete understanding of envelopes and tech reports. The problem was not in the static configuration of the pieces, but a dynamic emergent of their interaction.

Bicycle repair manuals tell you that when you disassemble some complex subassembly like a freewheel, put all the little pieces down on the ground in a row in the order you disassembled them. That’s because (if you know as much about freewheels as I do) the only available representation of the pieces is “weird little widgets.” They are indistinguishable from each other under this representation. Because quasi-static hardware can’t represent logical individuals, you can’t remember (much less reason about) which is which and what’s connected to what.

This story illustrates several themes of the paper. The manual’s advice is a piece of culturally transmitted metaknowledge that allows you to work around the limitations of your hardware in order to perform activity in a partly planned way. The plan—the order in which the freewheel should be reassembled—is not sufficient to completely determine the activity; you still have to be responsive to the situation to see just how each piece should be put back on. In fact, the plan is not even represented in your head, but externally, as a physical row of objects on the floor. Internalization of such an external representation may be the basis of our ability to remember lists of things to do.

I have a very large spice shelf, which until recently was total chaos. It occurred to me one day while fruitlessly searching for a jar of tarragon to alphabetize the shelf. In the course of doing so, I discovered a number of amazing things, among them that I had fourteen bottles of galangal.19 Galangal is not an easy spice to come by. I realized that every time I went to an oriental food store, as I do every few months, I would remember that difficulty and pick up a bottle. Using the culturally-given idea of alphabetizing, I was able to overcome my inability to introspect about my spice-buying routines. Since this routine (buying a jar of galangal every time) was certainly nowhere explicitly represented, introspection would not have helped even had my hardware supported it. Only if I thought to simulate several cycles of oriental-food-store shopping and could do so accurately (both unlikely) could I have discovered the bug.

Finding a spice jar on an alphabetized shelf is a search in the world, rather than in the head. Internalization of such searches produces the internal searches of which AI currently posits so many.

Sometimes planned action is fluid and routine. I have observed in more detail than belongs here the way I cope with the routine situation of coming through the front door of my house with a load of groceries on my bicycle, while wearing heavy winter clothing. Immediately after opening the door a dozen actions occur to me. This may seem like a lot; because we know how to cope with it, we underestimate the complexity of daily life. These actions for the most part do not stand in a means-ends relationship to each other; they satisfy the many different goals which are activated as I come through the door.

[The following discussion interweaves phenomenological observations of an everyday-life routine with unimplemented technical proposals about how to model it. The technical bits assume understanding of the state of the art of AI action theory as of 1986. So, you may want to skip over all that to the next section. Or, you might find the phenomenology interesting; it’s probably understandable if you just ignore the technical bits.]

I can not do all these things at once. However, this situation is routine in the sense that it happens often and I know how to cope with it without breakdown: it is not routine in that it is sufficiently complex and sufficiently variable that I have to plan to deal with it; I don’t have a stored macrop (canned action sequence) for it.

I can plan routinely to deal with this situation because about twenty arguments about how to proceed immediately occur to me. These are just at the fringe of consciousness. I can make them conscious effortlessly, but typically they flash by many per second, so they aren’t fully verbalized in the internal dialog. The arguments concern the order in which the actions should be done. If we were to encode these arguments in a dialectical interpreter, nonlinear planning would fall out automatically. A set of arguments about action orderings effectively constitute a partial order on plan steps. The argument that A should be before B can simply be phrased as objecting to B, non-monotonically dependent on AI’s not having been done; then nonlinear planning and execution fall out directly.

Of the arguments, roughly half are what might be called necessity orderings. They are arguments about what order things must be done in in order to work at all. They don’t say, action A has prerequisite p, which is clobbered by action B, so do A first; like the envelope example, they are at a higher level. You have to take off your coat before putting it away because… well, because that’s just the way it is. I must have known the reason once; it just seems self-evident now; and certainly doesn’t have anything to do with preconditions.

Besides necessity orderings, there are optimization arguments. Some of these are orderings; some are in the vocabulary of quasiquantitative time intervals. For example, I should lock the door before leaving the front hall, or I will forget to do it once I’m out of that context. Similarly, I should sign up for grocery money spent as soon as possible, because I often forget to do so, but remember now. Here I am working to overcome my own future immersion in a concrete situation. The door should be closed (as opposed to locked) within about ten seconds, because it’s freezing cold out. Again, I need to take off my coat within about a minute, or I will get hot and sweaty.

In fact, it so happens that the set of orderings is cyclic: there is an argument that I should put my keys (which I am holding) in my pocket first thing, to make it possible to grasp my bicycle and push it through the door; but there is also an argument that I shouldn’t put the keys away until I’ve locked the door, which can’t happen until I’ve closed it, which can’t happen until I’ve pushed the cycle through. This registers phenomenologically as a minor hassle; I feel slightly annoyed. Like cycles in planning generally, it must be resolved by adding another step (a white knight): in this case, it was to put the keys in my pocket now and take them out again later.

These arguments don’t take into account the number of available manipulators. For example, I could take off my coat before putting the bicycle up against the wall where it belongs. There is in fact an argument for that: I want to get out of my coat as soon as possible, while it doesn’t matter just when the cycle gets put away. However, I need about one and a half hands to hold up the bike (with its destabilizing load of groceries), so it would be difficult to take off my coat first. Introspectively, I don’t reason about hand allocation as I build the plan; and when I went to set it down on paper, it became obvious why. It’s absurdly difficult. It’s a pain even for a linear plan; you have to keep track of what’s in each hand at every instant. In a nonlinear plan, it seems to be just about impossible.

So I don’t plan manipulator allocation ahead of time; it’s very easy to deal with during execution, because I can just sense what is in my hands at any given instant. This is another example of the immediacy of the world making reasoning easy. Part of the reason this planning is routine and breakdown-free is that it happens that I never run out of hands. This is a contingent, emergent fact about the structure of the world and my ability to plan and our interactions. I couldn’t make the optimal decision in all cases, but I can do well enough in this one. To prove the former point, on the couple of occasions on which the phone has rung as I came in through the door, I experienced a breakdown. I left the door open and it got real cold in the front hall and my bicycle ended up on the floor with groceries spilling out of it and I left my coat on and I ended up feeling upset.

Cliches

Cognitive cliches are Chapman’s theory of the most abstract structures in the adult mind.20 These structures are substantially less general than, for example, predicate calculus formulae with a theorem prover. Cognitive cliches support only intermediate methods, which are moderately general purpose, in that a few of them will probably be applicable to any given task; efficient; and not individually particularly powerful. These structures are useful in representation, learning, and reasoning of various sorts. Together they form a general theory of special cases.

A cognitive cliche is a pattern that is commonly found in the world and, when recognized, can be exploited by applying the intermediate methods attached to it. The flavor of the idea is perhaps best conveyed by some examples: transitivity, cross products, successive approximation, containment, enablement, paths, resources, and propagation are all cognitive cliches. In general, a cognitive cliche is a class of structures which are components of mental models, occur in many unrelated domains, can be recognized in several kinds of input data, and for which several sorts of reasoning can be performed efficiently. Planning for Conjunctive Goals describes the possible application of cliches to classical planning. If a problem can be characterized in terms of certain cliches, otherwise intractable planning problems can be solved by polynomial intermediate methods.

Developmentally, cliches are abstracted from concrete competences in specific domains. Ideally, instances of, say, cross-product in many domains would be analogically related and the commonalities abstracted into a single coherent, explicitly represented intermediate-competence module. In fact, it seems likely that not all instances of cross-products are recognized as such, and that several clusters of them might join together, creating subtly different intermediate competence. This competence might not be as general in application as ideally it could be, yet still be useful.

What sort of routine activity might cognitive cliches be abstracted from? We suspect that the most basic, central cliches, the naive mathematical ones such as cross-product and ordering, are abstracted principally from the visual routines described by Shimon Ullman.21 In thinking about naive-mathematical cliches, we have a strong sense of visual processing being involved. When we think about cross products, we think of a square array or grid; when we think of an ordering, we think of a series of objects laid out along a line. We suspect that these cliches have been abstracted from visual routines for parsing just such images. There is a specific visual competence involved in looking at a plaid fabric, which is the ability to follow a horizontal line, then change to the vertical, and scan up or down, thus reifying the cross point. The internalization of this visual routine and others like it is the ability to see an array in the mind’s eye and similarly to scan either axis. This ability may serve as the nucleus for the development of all the naive-mathematical competence surrounding the idea of cross-products.

Visual routines are procedures for parsing images that are dynamically-assembled from a fixed set of visual primitives. By Ullman’s account, visual routines are compiled from explicitly represented procedures, but they might also be non-represented routines in our sense. We also suppose that oculomotor actions, as well as early vision computations, might be primitives in visual routines. Visual routines are used for intermediate-level vision: the primitives are too expensive to be computed locally over an entire image (as early vision computations are). The routines are executed in response to requirements of a late-vision object-recognition competence, which are too various to build into hardware. The internalization of visual routines results in a mind’s eye that is very far from an array of pixels, but rather consists of just enough machinery to simulate outputs from the visual routine primitives.

Conclusion

This paper summarizes portions of a paper, “AI and Everyday Life” we are writing about an emerging view of human activity. The new view starts from the concrete and uses an understanding of it to approach the traditional problems of abstract reasoning. This view is shared, at least in part, by many researchers who have come to it independently from very different perspectives. This gives us more confidence in its necessity. In most cases, researchers have reluctantly given up the traditional primacy of the abstract only in the face of some driving problem. Among these problems are programming a mobile robot, writing reflexive interpreters, deriving an ethnomethodological account of human-machine interaction, programming quasi-static computers, encoding complex concrete real-world problems, working around the computational intractability of classical planning, and developing a computational account of what is known in psychology about human development. We believe that finding coherence among such diverse problems will provide a broad base for work in the new view.22

Afterword, 2017

This paper is part of a century-long conversation that re-thinks meaningness↗︎︎ and what it is to be human.23 Some ideas in it were original to Agre and/or myself; but as the footnotes make clear, we took most from diverse disciplines outside of artificial intelligence.

There was an extraordinary flowering of this conversation in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1980s, when isolated researchers in seemingly unrelated fields realized they were addressing the same issues in similar ways. A key sentence in the paper is: “This view is shared, at least in part, by many researchers who have come to it independently from very different perspectives.” The synergies produced rapid progress and startling results.

Five years later, the movement fizzled out, and the era seems to have been forgotten.24 Many, but not all, of our ideas have been rediscovered since, without awareness of this prehistory. “How Embodied Is Cognition?” dates the beginnings of the E- movement to the 1990s, but its central ideas were fully formed in 1986.

The fizzling was, as far as I can tell, due to a series of unfortunate historical accidents, rather than intellectual flaws. We each dropped the research program for reasons of personal circumstance, mainly.

“Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity” may be the best overall summary of Agre’s and my joint work. (For a dramatically different, more recent overview, see “I seem to be a fiction.”) The paper was a presentation at a conference on models of action. I wrote it as an informal explanation of the conceptual framework for our research program, rather than as a report of results. As a conference paper, it was up against page limits, which may make it dense and difficult to follow.

All our other papers are available on the web, and have been cited several thousand times. This one seems to have been cited only twice. Presumably this is because the proceedings volume immediately disappeared into obscurity. Advice to young researchers: do not bury your most important work in a conference proceedings! It barely counts as an academic publication.

The Conclusion section promises a forthcoming paper “AI and Everyday Life: The Concrete-Situated View of Human Activity.” That was supposed to be the full-length version, with much more explanation, plus detailed reports on technical results. We never finished it. The book versions of Phil’s↗︎︎ and my PhD theses↗︎︎ were the most detailed accounts of our research, but they concentrated on technical results rather than the philosophical framework.

I evangelized the concrete-situated (“embodied, enactive, extended, embedded, ecological, engaged, emotional, expressive, emergent”) view at numerous conferences in the late 1980s. Some people got it; most didn’t. There was significant momentum for a while, but once we stopped pushing, cognitive “science” mostly reverted to its comfortable rationalist/representationalist ideology.

It seemed difficult to get the point across. I hope to do better now. Maybe there’s better explanatory technology available!

  • 1. Daniel D. Hutto and Patrick McGivern, “How Embodied Is Cognition?”, The Philosophers' Magazine, Issue 68, 1st Quarter 2015, pp. 77–83. I have edited the extract for clarity and concision, without (I hope) significantly altering its meaning. My thanks to Jayarava Attwood for pointing me to this paper.
  • 2. It was a 1986 conference presentation, published in a 1987 edited version of the conference proceedings. The full citation: David Chapman and Philip E. Agre, “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity,” Reasoning About Actions and Plans↗︎︎, Michael P. Georgeff and Amy L. Lansky, eds., Morgan-Kauffman, Los Altos, CA, 1987, pp. 411-424.
  • 3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time↗︎︎ (1962); Hubert Dreyfus, ↗︎︎ (1990). [Dreyfus’s book was listed as “forthcoming” in in our paper; we had a photocopy of his pre-publication manuscript, and it was the single biggest influence on our work.]
  • 4. Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1952) and Structuralism (1970).
  • 5. D. W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis↗︎︎ (1975).
  • 6. Philip E. Agre, “The Structures of Everyday Life↗︎︎,” MIT Working Paper 267, February 1985; “Routines↗︎︎,” MIT AI Memo 828, May 1985. Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, “AI and Everyday Life: The Concrete-Situated View of Human Activity,” in preparation. [We never finished that paper. A fuller account than the 1985 ones would be Agre’s 1997 Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎.]
  • 7. [“Simon’s ant” needed no footnote in 1987. It is a parable from Herbert Simon’s seminal The Sciences of the Artificial↗︎︎ (1969). The path an ant takes, when navigating rough terrain, may be enormously complex. However, the ant has no mental map of that path; it simply deals with local obstacles as it comes to them. The complexity is in the world, not in the ant’s brain.]
  • 8. [“The world and the mind interpenetrate” is the essential insight of the “E-word movement.” Amusingly, I attached a one-word note to this sentence in the document source text: “Expand.” This is what rationalists/cognitivists/representationalists have the hardest time understanding. I don’t know if any finite expansion is sufficient to induce the meta-rational cognitive flip.]
  • 9. Gary L. Drescher, The Schema Mechanism: A Conception of Constructivist Intelligence, unpublished Master’s thesis, MIT Department of EE and CS, 1985. “Genetic AI: Translating Piaget into LISP↗︎︎,” MIT AI Memo 890, 1986. [His 2003 Made-Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence↗︎︎ covers continued work in the same framework.]
  • 10. John E. Laird, Paul S. Rosenbloom, and Allen Newell, “Chunking in Soar: the Anatomy of a General Learning Mechanism,” Machine Learning, March 1986, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp 11–46.
  • 11. Philip E. Agre, “Routines.” MIT AI Memo 828, May 1985.
  • 12. Jeff Shrager, “(Cognitive) Mediation Theory.” Unpublished manuscript.
  • 13. Gerald Jay Sussman, A Computational Model of Skill Acquisition↗︎︎ (1975).
  • 14. Daniel Sabey Weld, “The Use of Aggregation in Causal Simulation,” Artificial Intelligence, 30:1-34, October 1986.
  • 15. Paula Menyuk, Sentences Children Use↗︎︎ (1969).
  • 16. Proceedings of the Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge, Monterey, California, March 1986.
  • 17. [The paper cites “AI and Everyday Life” as “forthcoming,” but it wasn’t. More about that later.]
  • 18. David Chapman, “Planning for Conjunctive Goals,” Artificial Intelligence 32 (1987) pp. 333-377. Revised version of MIT AI Technical Report 802↗︎︎, November, 1985.
  • 19. [In retrospect, it seems possible that this claim was exaggerated.]
  • 20. David Chapman, Cognitive Cliches↗︎︎. MIT AI Working Paper 286, February, 1986.
  • 21. Shimon Ullman, “Visual Routines,” MIT AI Memo 723, June, 1983.
  • 22. The paper ended with an Acknowledgments section: “Gary Drescher, Roger Hurwitz, David Kirsh, Jim Mahoney, Chuck Rich, and Ramin Zabih read drafts of this paper and provided useful comments. We would like to thank Mike Brady, Stan Rosenschein, and Chuck Rich for the several sorts of support they have provided this research in spite of its manifest flakiness. Agre has been supported by a fellowship from the Hertz foundation. This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory’s artificial intelligence research has been provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-80-C-0505, in part by National Science Foundation grant MCS-8117633, and in part by the IBM Corporation. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors, and should not be interpreted as representing the policies, neither expressed nor implied, of the Department of Defense, of the National Science Foundation, nor of the IBM Corporation.”
  • 23. The conversation begins, arguably, with Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1926, but begun several years earlier.
  • 24. I hope to write more about it soon. Particularly, the central role of Lucy Suchman↗︎︎, who was uniquely able to cross disciplinary boundaries and explain different fields to each other.

SBNR: system-free monism?

SBNR: Spiritual but not religious: system-free monism?

“Spiritual but not religious” (SBNR↗︎︎) describes a large, rapidly-growing fraction of Americans. Surveys suggest it’s a quarter of the population overall, and more than half of twenty-somethings.1 What it means is still unclear. I suggest that “system-free monism” defines this movement for many.

Monism?

Scholars use the word “monism↗︎︎” to describe any approach to spirituality that asserts the fundamental, organic unity of all things. Monism sees God more as a first principle, ultimate source, or unifying force, than as a person. It finds divinity in all things; most importantly, within ourselves. We are all parts of the one Spirit that encompasses the entire universe.

Monism takes this wholeness as the timeless, universal Truth behind all religions. Different religions are just different ways of reaching toward that one truth, so all religions are valid at their core.

Unfortunately, religions’ narrow dogmas and empty rituals hide the essential insight. Nearly all religions are dualist↗︎︎, meaning that they wrongly insist that divinity is always somewhere else. They say we are absolutely separated from God, from each other, and from nature.2 But, in reality, you can find the sacred here and now, in your own consciousness; you don’t need a priest and a church and a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.

My impression is that most SBNRs accept these monist ideas.3

Why are so many people choosing to be spiritual but not religious? Put another way, why is monism suddenly going mainstream now?

I think there are three reasons:

  • Monism is particularly relevant to current concerns;
  • The only well-known alternatives are increasingly unattractive;
  • A new, “system-free” form of monism avoids critical flaws in earlier versions.

I’ll explain these in turn.

Why monism now?

The way we live now is isolating, atomizing, alienating. We are artificially separated from each other, from nature, and even from our own everyday experience.

These are consequences of the modern social, economic, and technological order. We recognize that this isolation is unhealthy, unnatural, unsustainable.

We intuit that we are not separate; that we are intrinsically connected with everyone and everything everywhere. We long for community and for communion; for a return to the sacred.

Religion claims the sacred as its domain. But we see that religion too often divides us even further: from other people whose religions differ, from nature, and even from God. Dualist religion often seems to stand between us and reality. It separates, rather than unites.

A third alternative

If we abandoned religion, then what? The main alternative has been the materialist↗︎︎ consumer culture. But that denies any meaning beyond the superficial, ephemeral, and selfish.

Religion and consumerism have been pushing each other into increasingly extreme positions↗︎︎.

Religions world-wide have become increasingly fundamentalist; narrow, aggressive, and intolerant. They also insist on beliefs, rituals, and moral codes that seem increasingly absurd.

Many religious people would like to drop most specifics of their traditions. They cling to these details, no matter how out of step with reality, because traditional religion seems the only way to preserve meaning and value in the face of attack from consumerist meaninglessness.

Consumerism, meanwhile, heads ever further into nihilistic↗︎︎ triviality. Denying the connections between us, it encourages selfish greed. Denying the connections between humans and nature, it produces environmental disasters. Denying spiritual meaning altogether, it reduces the world to a game in which he who dies with the most toys, wins.

Monism offers a hopeful third alternative. It liberates one from the wrong-headed specifics of religion. On the other hand, it can point out what’s important in life, versus the stuff that doesn’t matter. It preserves meaning and a role for the sacred. It affirms the connectedness of all things, our joyful responsibility to care for all beings, and the possibility of experiencing unity with the universe.

System-free: after the New Age

Monist principles are shared with the New Age movement, and SBNR is often confused with the New Age. However, most SBNRs reject the New Age.4 What is the difference? And why are 20-somethings SBNR where their parents’ generation might have been New Agers?

The problem with the New Age is that it is not a simple, basic orientation toward meaningness. Instead, it is a big collection of specific belief systems. They share the fundamental monist view, but each has its own complex details.

The problem with the New Age is that most of its specifics are pretty silly. Do you really believe that crystal healing comes from ancient astronauts who taught psychic skills to the peaceful pyramid-builders of Atlantis? Anyway, who cares?

People try to believe that kind of stuff because, until recently, it was the only way to access monism. The New Age was pretty much the only game in town, if you rejected both religion and materialism. New Agers were the only ones talking about wholeness and connectedness and consciousness.

Often SBNRs are said to reject “organized religion.” Although this is roughly true, I think it misses the key point.

I don’t think SBNRs are against organizations as such. What they reject is the whole category of systems. By “systems,” I mean ideologies that claim to have a complete set of answers about meaningness↗︎︎, or some dimensions of meaningness. Religious organizations are basically corporations that try to sell you spiritual systems.

The American Baby Boom generation grew up within systems of traditional religion—Christianity, mostly. Though many rejected the specifics of Christianity (and in fact all religions), systems make sense to Boomers. The New Age systems are comfortable as alternatives.

But later generations have grown up in a “post-ism-ist” world↗︎︎. The time for big complicated ideologies that try to tell you everything about what to believe and do has passed↗︎︎. No system like that can be credible anymore. Younger people don’t want or expect to find a complete set of answers in one place.

Monism is a fundamental stance↗︎︎ toward meaningness, not a system. It is simple and basic. It doesn’t require you to believe or do anything specific. (It isn’t really an “ism,” despite the word.)

Because the sacred is within ourselves, and is visible in nature, you don’t need a system to find it. You only need to recognize what is obviously there.

Why the new spirituality matters

Many religious leaders dismiss SBNR as lightweight, faddish, cotton-candy spirituality. They expect young people will grow out of it. I think they are wrong on both counts.

Monism is a serious alternative to traditional, dualist religion. No longer weighted down with the dogmas and rituals of silly New Age systems, it appears to be growing rapidly.

Wishy-washy moderate religion seems to have no spiritual inspiration, and people are leaving it in droves. Most people understand that neither fundamentalism nor materialism can be the right answer. Monism is newly attractive as an alternative. Apparently, it appeals to a majority of people growing up now—and that makes sense.

If I were a religious leader, I would be panicking and scrambling for a response. Luckily, I am not a religious leader…

I am not a monist. A fourth alternative

…but I am concerned nonetheless.

I am spiritual, but not religious.

However, I am not a monist.

My experience is that monists suffer frequent spiritual disappointment and unnecessary suffering. I think this is inevitable: monism cannot deliver on some core promises.

Fortunately, monism is not the only way to be spiritual while avoiding religion and materialism. There is another, fourth alternative: not monism, not dualist religion, and not materialism.

This alternative includes what is right in monism, while avoiding its errors. Like the new monism, it is not a system. Unlike monism, it may deliver on its promises.

This site is devoted to explaining that fourth alternative.

  • 1.Cultural Creatives↗︎︎,” who overlap strongly with SBNR, are supposed to be about a quarter of Americans; the similar “LOHAS segment↗︎︎” is reported at 30%. CNN reports↗︎︎ 72 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in a 2009 survey describe themselves as “more spiritual than religious.”
  • 2. There are non-dualist religions: some branches of Buddhism and Hinduism, for instance. These have probably had a strong influence on the development of SBNR. Many SBNR people are at least sympathetic to these, and might make them exceptions to their rejection of “religion.”
  • 3. I have no statistics for this; it’s just based on talking with people. Since monism is a stance—a basic attitude—not a religious or philosophical system, it has no salespeople. No one tries to convince you to “become a monist,” so most SBNRs will not have heard the term. To find out how prevalent monism is, numerically, a survey would need to ask people in more detail about their spiritual orientation.
  • 4. This is a personal observation; again I don’t have any statistics.

The Court of Values and the Bureau of Boringness

If you had a choice between voting in a farcical reality-TV-like election for a purely symbolic court, and voting in a serious election for critical government policy-making positions, which would you choose?

I want to persuade you that you would—and should!—sometimes cast a symbolic vote.

And I want to persuade you that giving everyone that choice might be the best way to save democracy—maybe even civilization.

The Beeblebrox Gambit

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy↗︎︎, Zaphod Beeblebrox is the President of the Galaxy. He is immature, irresponsible, and insensitive; a hedonistic, charismatic narcissist; a clueless, grandiose buffoon.

The position of President of the Galaxy is purely ceremonial, with no actual power or responsibility. The true decision-makers created it to attract attention away from themselves. An outrageous, charismatic narcissist is exactly the sort of person you want in the job.

Beeblebrox has been voted “Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe” seven consecutive times. He has two heads, and grew a third arm to grope Eccentrica Gallumbits, the famous Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six. Some find that unnatural and immoral, and say it makes him temperamentally unfit to be President.

If you want to distract people from significant decisions, getting them to vote based on ridiculous clothing and controversial “values issues” seems an excellent strategy.

In 1978, when Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide, this was an entertaining satire—an absurd exaggeration of something that one might imagine happening in a much less flamboyant way in real life.

But now it’s just true. Public politics in major Western democracies is mostly culture war drama over personalities and symbolic virtue issues. One cannot help suspecting that controversies are engineered deliberately to distract voters from the most important (but boring) policy issues. Those get quietly captured by unnamed economic interests in backroom deals.

In elections, many voters choose based on what candidates wear, what they look like, their sex lives, and the outrageous, clueless, and narcissistic things they say. Most voters are neither curious nor realistic about policy issues, and so are astonishingly ignorant↗︎︎ or have dire misunderstandings↗︎︎ about government and its functions.

Policy is captive to↗︎︎ symbolic politics—popularity contests and debates about which demographic groups get how much ritual status. It’s not surprising that government works less well than one might hope. How can we free it, so it can get on with the boring pragmatic business of governing?

A shadow coup

A nihilistic approach would be anarcho-capitalism, or some extreme form of libertarianism. The government can’t do its job—democracy is structurally incapable of producing sane policy—so get rid of most or all of it. Especially, get rid of all the symbolic nonsense: the many harmful policies whose only function is virtue signaling↗︎︎.

Or, just the opposite, but equally nihilistic. A technocratic shadow coup, after which the real decisions are made by competent, impartial, unelected people elsewhere, and the legacy state is converted into a Beeblebroxian reality-TV drama whose purpose is only to distract the populace.

But… to a significant extent, this has already happened. We’ve had a slow-motion coup by too-big-to-fail banks, the prison-industrial complex, the medical industry, and government departments that run themselves for their own benefit, to the detriment even of the rest of the government. In defense of the current American President, whose main accomplishment in eight years was to increase the subsidy to insurance companies, the position may now be purely ceremonial. The difference between what we have and the “technocratic coup” scenario is that the decision makers, inside or outside government, are often incompetent and self-interested.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, with big drama and explosive secrets. It’s all out in the open; but everyone just shrugs and says yeah, well, what can you do.

This is wrong. We shouldn’t give up on government; that is indeed meta-political nihilism.

Making democracy safe for the world

Although in 2016 it is not working quite as well as we might wish, I believe in democracy. Not because it is The One Cosmically True Political System. (Believing that would be systematic eternalism.) But because it has usually worked better than alternatives, historically; and because it does give voters a veto on the worst outcomes. Maybe voters are poorly informed, maybe they mostly elect mediocre governments, but usually they can at least prevent drastic misrule.

So I reject the nihilistic alternatives of anarchism and unelected technocracy—and the nihilistic status quo of bumbling kleptocracy.

Some say voters get the government they deserve; if you want better government, you need better voters. Better educated or better values or better something—but this does not seem very realistic.

Alternatively, we could restrict suffrage to the best voters—those who are informed, impartial, and intelligent. This proposal has an exalted and venerable lineage, culminating in the publication two months ago of Jason Brennan’s much-discussed Against Democracy↗︎︎. It faces both moral and practical objections. Morally, it violates intuitions of fairness and equality. Practically, deciding who is “informed, impartial, and intelligent” would become the main political conflict; and any procedure enacted to vet voters would inevitably get gamed↗︎︎ by interest groups.

The question is, how can we restore informed democratic control over pragmatic policy, without restricting suffrage or expecting miraculous improvements in the quality of the electorate?

I have a modest proposal.

I offer it in the tradition of Swiftian satire—outrageous, over-the-top, and tongue-in-cheek—because:

  1. There’s no point arguing about the details, so making them ridiculous is a reminder not to get hung up on practical objections
  2. It’s a few days before the 2016 American Presidential election, and you could probably use some light entertainment.

So most likely it wouldn’t work, and it’s probably infeasible to get from here to there even if it would.

It may still be useful for provoking the question: could something else achieve the same goals? And somewhere in it, there is a grain of serious meaning. Perhaps even a small pastry. At the end there will be cake.

A fundamental division of government functions

The book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work↗︎︎ finds that most people don’t want to know how the government works, and don’t want to be involved in its decision making. They want a competent, impartial technocracy that silently delivers sensible solutions like a smoothly-functioning washing machine. This is essentially the “shadow coup” scenario; except that people do, sensibly, also want veto power when the government gets jammed and shorts out and their laundry catches fire.

The problem with voters is not so much that they are ignorant and stupid, it’s that they are playing a different game. They don’t care about government, but they do care intensely about politics. Political conflict, for many, is a critical source of meaning, tribal belonging, and personal identity, comparable to art, ethics, religion, and psychology.

Many are highly informed and intelligent—but about the “wrong” things. They may not know much about the national infrastructure policy—because they simply don’t care about it—but they are keenly interested in the distribution of social status. Much of current politics concerns issues like: Should married white heterosexual church-goers get more or less status than they do now? How about young black males? Lesbians, police, immigrants, veterans? Many voters have extensive, detailed, passionate opinions about such matters.

These are questions our current systems of government were not designed to address, however. Our governments were designed to deal with highway maintenance.1

So there’s a profound mismatch between what voters think politics should be about and what the electoral system was designed for. Here in thought-experiment land, we can fix that! Let us take voters seriously, and give them the form of government they say they want. Let us make a fundamental division of functions:

  • The Bureau of Boring Bureaucracy is in charge of the practical policy, like banking regulation, highway maintenance, cybersecurity, and pensions. It is structured much the same way as the best current governments, but with all the ritual and symbolic aspects stripped out.

  • The Court of Virtuous Values is in charge of the ritual and symbolic functions of government, and the regulation of some ritual and symbolic aspects of national life.

Both divisions are democratically elected, according to an extraordinarily clever scheme described below, which solves all social problems here in Aretopia, the nation that implemented this thought-experiment.

The Values Court

Cadillac receiving letters patent for Detroit

I mean “Court” in an archaic sense: a branch of government largely concerned with status and ceremony. Although neither monarchical nor religious, it might show much of the texture and function of both. As our current national politics already does, according to Jonathan Haidt:

At the local level, politics is all practical stuff; dogcatchers and property values. It’s not very ideological. National politics is much more like a religion. The president is the high priest of the American civil religion↗︎︎.2

The Court is not a legal tribunal, with cases and lawyers. It does pass judgement on questions of social justice—insofar as those are purely symbolic.

The Court decides values issues, like whether recycling is virtuous, whether immigrants are good or bad people, whether smoking marijuana is degenerate, and whether frogs are racist↗︎︎. Most people enjoy symbolic drama, and many want to engage in ritual tribal conflict. That intensifies feelings of group membership, and provides an opportunity to climb intra-tribal status ladders. The Court grants these symbolic goods.

Lord Justice Sir Christopher Pitchford

The Court has no power over practical matters; it cannot set immigration policy, or put you in jail for drug use. Mostly, all it can do is officially pronounce its official opinion. Such opinions can ritually exalt or humiliate people, which is a symbolic issue. The Court also has coercive powers to regulate certain symbolic activity, as we’ll see below.

The Court should be somewhat ridiculous. In fact, the voting scheme makes that nearly inevitable. It winds up full of outrageous charismatic buffoons. Some may have two heads and three arms, or fluorescent yellow hair and bright orange skin. They wear fancy hats, and grant themselves preposterous titles: The Grand MC for National Togetherness Day, the Chief Marshal of Drama Guns, The Lord High Censor of Outrageous Words, and the Fount of National Status↗︎︎. I explain these roles later.

This division of government resembles the Beeblebrox gambit. However, the Values Court is not fake. It’s not a cynical reality TV show put on by the elite to fool and distract the masses with trivia.

It’s a totally sincere reality TV show, put on by the masses to manage matters that matter—as I shall attempt to persuade you below.

The Boringness Bureau

The Bureau, by contrast, is full of tedious policy wonks, popularly referred to as Grayfaces↗︎︎, or less politely, Vogons.

The Bureau has no hats, and no head, because it is not a ceremonial institution. The President of the Court of Values is by definition the high priest head of government.

The most important members of the Bureau have titles like Second Deputy Undersecretary for Financial Services Regulation (probably the most important Bureaucratic position) and the Assistant Attache to the Ministry of Buffer Bounds Checking (in charge of cyber security).

Need I say more? No, because you are already so bored you are about to go check twitter instead of reading more of my post.

The incredibly clever hack that makes this work

Really need to do laundry, but torn between SLUT and COWBOY settings

Court and Bureau elections are held simultaneously, and you can vote in only one of the two—whichever you choose. People who care about symbols vote in the Values election; people who care about policy vote Boring. This gives more people more of what they want.

The people who vote for Values candidates get all the colorful drama and excitement and status-signaling opportunities they want from politics-as-sportsball. Boring people get to help set boring policies without having those hijacked as tribal symbols.

The Boring voters have, on average, more realistic opinions about boring stuff, so everyone gets better policies. The Values voters get the competent, smooth-running government they want, without ever having to think about mortgage derivatives and particulate emissions and Teh Cyber.

Everyone gets much of the benefit of a benevolent technocratic coup, or of restricting the vote to the competent, without the unfairness of depriving anyone of democratic rights. It also preserves the people’s veto in case of severe government malfunction—if the Bureau ever goes off the rails, everyone can vote in the Bureaucratic election and throw the Vogons out of office.

But, you object, this is transparent; everyone would realize that the Bureau is the real government and the Court is a sham. Therefore, nearly everyone would do the responsible thing and vote Boring.

So I am going to try to convince you that’s not true. I’m going to try to convince you that you would vote Values, at least sometimes. I’ve convinced myself that I would!

I’m going to slowly ramp up the pressure...

What would make you vote Values?

Let’s start with the elections themselves. As a ceremonial matter, the election process is decided by the Values Court (although the Boring Bureau is in charge of ensuring the count is accurate). The Values Court is of course full of people who think everyone should vote in their election, so they make Values campaigns as exciting and entertaining as possible. Elections are held annually, and the hoopla runs year-round. Unconstrained by any need to pretend to care about Boring matters, the candidates can devote 100% of their campaigning to ethnic insults, sexual innuendo, conspiracy theories, and promises to make the nation proud of the flag.

The voters elect the top Court officials, but many lower-ranked positions may be selected in reality-TV contests, running throughout the year. It’s up to the Values Court to decide how to run its own affairs. If you don’t like it, you can vote for candidates who promise to replace the bug-eating event with something more dignified. Probably involving bathing suits.

Are you prepared to vote Values yet?

OK, no, I didn’t think so. But maybe you will now admit that some people are. And maybe you’re glad they won’t be voting for the Undersecretary for Financial Services Regulation.

To make you want to vote Values, we need to increase the cost of voting Boring. A monetary cost would be discriminatory and wrong. But there has to be something you give up if you vote Boring—or, equivalently, something else at stake in the Court.

We have to give the Court more bite. Maybe giving the Court power over the ceremonial functions of government is not enough to make most people choose to vote there. Maybe it has to have symbolic power over citizens too.

What am I, personally, willing to sacrifice in order to get competent government?

I hold the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights as sacred as anything. The Bill, and especially the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of expression, make America the greatest country in the world. So contemplating any lessening of those freedoms hurts. But the First Amendment limits the symbolic powers of the state, and in Aretopia I am willing to compromise on that—if we get good government in exchange.

So now I’ll suggest three possible powers of the Values Court. In Aretopia, there may be dozens or hundreds; I’m sketching just three to give a sense of its function.

The Lord High Censor

Many passionately political people seem to want, more than anything else, to ban bad words. That would violate the freedom of speech, so currently they are only partly successful. However, this is a purely symbolic matter, and so within the purview of the Virtue Court. I, for one, do not want people for whom this is the most important issue to have much of a say on electrical grid policy. So, to ensure that they vote in the right election, let us give the Court some limited authority.

A branch of the Court of Virtuous Values, overseen by the annually-elected Lord High Censor, bans one word every month. Each ban lasts for two years. After that, it has to be re-banned, or else it becomes legal again.

There are more than 24 offensive words, so there is a non-stop year-round controversy about which one to ban this month. Many are derogatory demographic epithets, so the battle is largely over which groups are most oppressed. Other bad words are those considered vulgar by social conservatives. Fortunately there are plenty of those as well, and demanding their elimination keeps another tribal-politics sector of the populace enjoyably occupied.

This small abridgment of freedom of speech is met with great joy by many, for whom the main point of politics is, through social solidarity, to force Bad Tribe members to shut up. The opportunity to use the coercive power of the state to do so—even in such a limited way—is wonderfully gratifying.

I think it’s horrible that anyone can do that—but if it eliminates their influence on energy infrastructure decisions, I’m willing to compromise.

Choosing the National Dress for National Togetherness Day

In Aretopia, participation in the yearly National Togetherness Day celebration is mandatory. During the festivities, everyone must wear the National Dress. The Court decides, annually, what the year’s National Dress will be.

This is purely symbolic, of course. Most sophisticated people loathe National Togetherness Day, and go on long, cynical, boring rants about how it should be called National Tribal Hatred Day, and why making it mandatory was an outrage.3 But many less-pretentious people care intensely about the National Dress.

  • Some progressives want to mandate the same outfit for men and women. Some conservatives want to put women in skirts and men in trousers.
  • Should we choose a National Dress like the ones from forty years ago, as a statement of traditional values and the continuity of national greatness? Would that be fusty, or classic? Should we choose a National Dress that expresses contemporary values? Would that be stylish, or ridiculous?
  • Maybe men’s National Dress should have a somewhat military cut? Maybe we should all wear unisex jumpsuits?
  • Should we allow people a choice of colors, to express support for individualism and diversity? Or set a single color scheme, to express national unity?

And, of course, there’s the choice of music to be played at the National Day parade, and speeches to be made, and…

What percentage of voters care more about choosing the Grand MC for National Togetherness Day than about the Assistant Attache to the Ministry of Buffer Bounds Checking? I would guess at least a substantial minority; maybe a majority. Do you want people who care that much about the National Dress to have any influence on internet policy? I don’t.

You are probably an exception. You probably do care more about cybersecurity than anything symbolic. But I promised I would try to convince you otherwise…

This year in Aretopia, a substantial dickhead contingent—who are totally not an allegory for any emerging American political movement—is campaigning for the National Dress for women to be a teeny weeny bikini, and a WWII Nazi officer’s uniform for men.

Now how much do you care about cryptographic standards? How likely is it that they will get significantly screwed up in one year, if you chose not to vote Boring this time? If it looks like the saner voters in the Values election will get split among multiple factions, and the Dickhead Contingent may win, maybe it’s time to vote Values?

National Status

The symbolic issue everyone cares most about is personal status. Since the Great Rotation, that’s what politics is mostly about. So instead of trying to reform politics to not be about that, let’s co-opt it.

The Aretopian Constitution mandates that everyone gets assigned a National Status ranking every year. It ranges from 1 to 100, and the Constitution mandates that 1% of the population will get each grade. The Values Court decides annually how to award Status.

In public, everyone has to wear their National Status Symbol at all times.4 It’s a badge, required to be visible, that shows your status number. It’s up to the Values Court to determine details, but maybe they come in ten colors, corresponding to the ten deciles, so anyone can see from a distance approximately what your National Status is. For the top 1% only, there is a specially distinctive badge—a gold star, maybe. And, there are certain symbolic privileges that come with high Status. If it’s above 50, you are allowed to carry a flag in the National Day parade. If it’s above 80, you can wear a National Order of Virtue hat. Above 95, you march at the front.

So, you might say, this is ridiculous, no one would care what their National Status is. It won’t accurately reflect real social status, and everyone would realize it’s nonsense.

And, yes, no one took it seriously at first. But in year one, the Court was packed with progressives—conservatives mostly voted Boring—and it decided to award National Status based on how much of your garbage you recycled. Conservatives didn’t care, but progressives… well, actually, they started noticing who was recycling. You can’t help seeing whose pin is green and whose is red. Or black. Nobody cares that much about recycling, but… isn’t this a good way to “nudge↗︎︎” people gently toward civic virtue? So in year two, they knocked points off for people who smoke. And for buying too-large bottles of cola. The formula started to get quite complicated.

And then, they decided that racial minorities, who are historically discriminated against, ought to get a National Status boost. If you are of the Aretopian dominant ethnicity, you couldn’t get above 75 even if you recycled everything.

Conservatives got really mad about that, and voted in massive numbers to elect a Values Court that awards National Status for church attendance. Meanwhile, the Boring Bureau had legalized most drugs—since drug policy is a practical matter, that’s in their remit. But drugs are immoral, and morality is the Values Court’s remit. Conservatives added a heavy penalty for drug use to the Status formula.

And… racism hasn’t gone away. Employment law is Boring Bureaucracy, and job interviews are the one time you are not allowed to wear your National Status Symbol. But racial status? That’s the job of the Values Court. The racial majority is sick of the Status preference for minorities. The conservative Values Court rolls it back.

Is that good enough? Many in the racial majority say immigrants—who just happen mostly to be of a different race—hurt the country economically. Is economics really the issue, or is that a smokescreen for racism? In America, we don’t know for sure. In Aretopia, you have to decide which you actually care about. Do you vote in the Boring election, which influences immigration and economic policy; or for the Values Court, which could award low National Status to immigrants—or even penalize racial minorities outright?

The National Status auction

Progressives might want to give a National Status boost to poor people. But… let’s think outside the box for a minute. Maybe you should be allowed to just buy Status? And the purchase price would go toward the national budget, to be used as the Boring Bureaucracy decides.

Consider an annual Status auction. You can bid however much you want for National Status; the bids are sorted, and where you are in the rank order determines what Status you get. How much would you pay?

You’d probably bid more if the formula depended partly on the auction, and partly on virtue. No one knows for sure if you have a 73 status because you recycle dutifully and go to church every week and eat a balanced diet, or because you just bought your status. Now how much would you bid?

Rich people would, of course, all have high National Status. Extremely unfair! Except, I think they might wind up spending a substantial fraction of their income in competition for it. I would guess that a Status 100 gold star badge might get bid up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Everyone would know that it was just money—but that’s what yachts are, too. For the 1%, it would seem worth it.

That would decrease everyone else’s taxes. Taxes, of course, are a Boring matter, and the Virtue Court couldn’t impose any. But the more money the Status auction brings in, the lower the tax rate the Boring Bureau could set.

Perhaps, ideally, this could make taxation entirely voluntary. The Status auction would wind up being so lucrative that no actual taxes would be required. Pay whatever you like, and accept the National Status consequences.

Isn’t it awful that income would largely determine Status at the high end? But isn’t it great that the effective tax rate would, on average, be much more progressive than now?

I said buying Status is just like buying a yacht. Except that does no one any good. Buying Status contributes to everyone else’s well-being (so long as the Boring Bureau spends the money reasonably well). So actually, buying Status really is a civic virtue.

If your doctor’s National Status Symbol—remember everyone’s has to be visible all the time—says 63, won’t you think “geez, that guy is selfish—maybe he recycles, but he sure isn’t contributing his fair share to the national budget, not with what doctors make! He could easily afford to be in the 90s, even if he didn’t do anything particularly virtuous besides making his Status Auction contribution!”

Getting the details of the National Status calculation right is, you see, going to be quite tricky—and quite important.

Now are sure you will always vote Boring?

Maybe at this point you object that the national budget is so important that the Court of Virtue shouldn’t be involved. But Americans can make a voluntary contribution to the national budget any time they like. All that involving the Court does is symbolism. Symbolism is important! Do your civic duty: vote for Values!

If almost everyone voted Values almost all the time, the Bureau would be captured by cranks and trolls. So you should be strategic. When it seems like the Court has been doing an adequate job for the past few years, and pre-election polling suggests that much the same set of Courtiers will be elected this year, you can vote Vogon. Especially, you should do that if it’s looking like the Bureaucratic election is shaping up to favor economic policies you disagree with. Contrariwise, even if most years you vote Bureaucratically because you recognize that cybersecurity is an urgent priority, when it looks like the Court is going to do something unusually insane, you should switch.

In which I defend this travesty against numerous excellent objections

You aren’t serious

This post addresses the same problems as Brennan’s Against Democracy, and my proposal seems (to me, offhand) to be at least as good, and more original.5 Since its publication two months ago, Against Democracy has been reviewed by Very Serious Pundits in Very Serious Fusty Old Publications like The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Plus many major pundish political blogzines.

(Note to Princeton University Press: I am open to a book deal.)

You are just proposing another unrealistic system

In my last post, I suggested that advocating particular systems of government is mostly unhelpful. Proposing clever, logically elegant systems that supposedly solve all social problems is completely delusional. So, wtf, dude?

That is one reason I made the current post deliberately ridiculous. The point is not the system as such, which—I am sure you will hasten to point out—has numerous obvious and fatal flaws.

My actual intent is meta-systematic, or meta-political. I want to clarify the problem, and to prompt thinking about how it might be addressed in a less silly and totalistic way.

This doesn’t prevent the Vogons from becoming corrupt

Yes, but neither does the current system. The Aretopian scheme increases democratic influence on the Vogons relative to the status quo. That won’t eliminate principal/agent problems, but it may help. Bureau voters are likely to at least understand the problem of regulatory capture, whereas most voters currently don’t.

Also, didn’t I say that practical objections are not relevant to this preposterous proposal?

This hands the dominant social classes even more power

Many studies have found that in America, men, the well-off, white people, and other dominant groups are better informed about policy issues, on average. They vote more on the basis of policy preferences than candidates’ hair styles. This is one of many reasons government policies generally reflect their agendas. In Aretopia, those groups often vote Boring, whereas women, the poor, and racial minorities tend to vote Values.

It is reasonable, then, to object that even if the Aretopian scheme is democratic in form, it would be undemocratic in outcome. Elites would leverage it to increase their already disproportionate power and wealth.

Income redistribution is perhaps the only actual policy issue most people care about.6 If they feel they have to vote Boring to influence it, that would wreck the whole thing.

If I was trying to be serious, I might suggest dealing with this problem via some additional mechanism. Brennan recognizes the issue, and suggests several tentative solutions.

The most mathematically elegant would weight Boring votes according to demographic representation. If (for instance) only 6% of Boring voters were black, versus 12% of the total population, each black Boring vote would count double.

This might result in the Bureau being elected primarily by informed, impartial, intelligent Aretopian Aboriginal lesbians. Maybe that would be good.

This wouldn’t work, and/or is immoral, because—

Stop it! You are taking it too seriously.7

If you want serious, I made many boring proposals for improving politics in my previous post.

They have a Worthy Canadian Initiative flavor.

You said there will be cake

Morning bun
Morning bun image courtesy↗︎︎ cacaobug

The cake is a lie↗︎︎.

Maybe there’s a morning bun of meaning concealed in this comical maze, though.

  • 1. Some libertarians would argue that the government shouldn’t be in the highway business, any more than in the social status business. I’m somewhat sympathetic to small-government views, but I won’t address that here. I will suggest, instead, getting the government explicitly into the social status business, thereby increasing its role and powers—although in general I am wary of doing so. Such is the miraculous transformational power of thought-experiment land.
  • 2. Paraphrased from a conversation with Tyler Cowen↗︎︎.
  • 3. The penalty for refusing to wear National Dress is ritual humiliation. You get a bucket of cold spaghetti marinara dumped on your head on live TV while being interviewed by an obnoxious reality-TV host who tries to make you feel bad about about not being Together and National enough. Since the Court’s ability to interfere with speech is strictly circumscribed, you can say anything you like, including that you hate National Togetherness and you want the old First Amendment back. Which is exactly what I would do. Secretly, this whole proposal is just my sneaky plan to get to go on TV every year and rant in support of the Bill of Rights.
  • 4. Many well-known science fiction stories feature similar schemes. They are usually presented as dystopian. I am a contrarian.
  • 5. Two somewhat similar proposals are futarchy↗︎︎ and liquid democracy↗︎︎. Thanks to Joshua Brulé for pointing me at these.
  • 6. Curiously, opinion on this topic is nearly unanimous. Virtually everyone agrees that they (and people like them) morally deserve more slices of pie than they currently get. I am unusual in having no particular take on this. My opinion is that “everyone gets the same regardless” and “let the disabled starve” are both wrong. Nearly everyone agrees. After that, the question is usually treated as purely quantitative—should tax rates be more or less progressive?—and I don’t see any principled, moral way of resolving that. The answer is: 42. What exactly was the question, again?
  • 7. Actually, I would welcome objections on the comment page. I don’t promise to give serious replies, but I’m at least curious.

A first lesson in meta-rationality

Bongard problem #5

The contents of the six boxes on the left all have something in common. The six on right also all have something in common, which is the opposite of the ones on the left. What is it?

This is called a Bongard problem. I will suggest that Bongard problems are a particularly simple example of meta-systematic cognition, or “meta-rationality.” This post might be the first lesson in a course that trains you in meta-rational thinking.

The problem above is pretty easy. Here is a somewhat more difficult example:

Bongard problem #4

(Ignore the distracting skeuomorphic↗︎︎ ring-binder graphic in the middle; it’s not part of the problem. What makes the six boxes on the left different from the six on the right?)

Another problem of medium difficulty:

Bongard problem #38

Bongard problems work inside-out from most puzzles. In a typical puzzle format, you are given a system of rules, and a specific case, and you have to figure out how to apply the rules to that case. For example, the Sudoku rules: the goal is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 subgrids contains all of the digits from 1 to 9. In a specific Sudoku puzzle, some of the squares in the grid are already filled in, and you have to fill in the rest while obeying the rules.

In a Bongard problem, you have to figure out what the rule is. You are given twelve specific images, and the result of applying the rule to each. (The rule assigns an image to either the left or right group.) Once you have discovered the rule, applying it to new images would be trivial.

The rule for the first problem, at the top of this page, is “figures with straight line segments on the left, ones with smooth curves on the right.” The second is “convex vs. concave.” And the third is “triangle bigger than circle, vs. circle bigger than triangle.” I found the third a bit more complicated, because I got distracted by the positioning of the two figures in space, and was especially confused by the containment relationships. But all that turns out to be irrelevant.

What makes Bongard problems interesting, and in some cases very difficult, is that there is no explicit limitation to what sorts of rules there may be. However, in a well-formed Bongard problem, there should only be one reasonable rule. Once you see it, there is an “aha!” moment, with an enjoyable jolt of understanding.

Here’s a harder one:

Bongard problem #104

This one is still harder:

Bongard problem #112

If you enjoy puzzle solving, you might like to work through some more in Harry Foundalis’ collection↗︎︎ of nearly three hundred. (You don’t need to do that to understand this post, though.)

If you got stuck on the last two above, the solutions are in this footnote.1 (If you hover your mouse over a footnote number, you can read its text. Or you can click on it to jump to the feet.)

How you solve Bongard problems

To solve a Sudoku puzzle, you work within a system of rules. This is the essence of systematic thinking, or formal rationality.

To solve a Bongard problem, you discover a rule—a very simple system. This makes for a “minimal,” “toy,” or “petri dish” version of meta-systematicity. Meta-systematic cognition evaluates, chooses, combines, modifies, discovers, or creates systems—rather than working within one.

My earlier post “How To Think Real Good” mostly describes ways of thinking meta-systematically, in science and engineering domains—although I wasn’t conscious of that when I wrote it! Much of it is about problem formulation. As I wrote:

Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it.

The Bongard problems take this principle to an extreme. Each problem is simply to figure out what the problem is!

Many of the heuristics are about how to take an unstructured, vague problem domain and get it to the point where formal methods become applicable.

The essence of Bongard problem solution is similar: you need to find the formal structure that makes sense of the data. The difference is that Bongard problems are much less vague than real-world ones typically appear on arrival. They are also simpler, of course. Between crispness and simplicity, you can solve a Bongard problem in seconds, minutes, or hours, where STEM ones can take days, weeks, or years.

Lovelace and Babbage: perhaps we should build a model!
From The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage↗︎︎

I read Doug Hofstadter’s mind-altering book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid↗︎︎ on the philosophy of artificial intelligence in 1979, but hadn’t looked again since. When researching this post, I discovered that Bongard problems were first popularized by a brief discussion in GEB—which I had entirely forgotten.2 It turns out that Hofstadter’s analysis develops some of the same themes as “How To Think”; I return to them in this post.3

In “How To Think,” I wrote that:

Any situation can be described in infinitely many ways. Choosing a vocabulary, at the right level of description, for describing relevant factors, is key to understanding.4

As Hofstadter explains in detail, this is also how you solve Bongard problems. There’s two aspects: levels of description, and relevant factors. As for the first, I wrote:

A successful problem formulation has to make explicit the distinctions that are used in the problem solution.

You start by recognizing simple figures, such as triangles and squares. Then you start building up descriptions in terms of properties and relationships. Some of the figures are big, some are small; some point up, some point down. Some are inside others; some touch others; some are right or left of others. At a next level, you inventory properties and relationships of properties and relationships. In some figures, circles only touch triangles that point up; or there are always three little things inside a big thing; or the centers of all the big figures form a line. The difficulty of a Bongard problem depends, in part, on how many levels of description are involved.

Regarding the second aspect I wrote:

A successful formulation has to abstract the problem to eliminate irrelevant detail, and make it small enough that it’s easy to solve.

Hofstadter describes this in terms of “filtering and focussing.” Even in Bongard problems, crisp and simple as they are, nearly everything you could say about a diagram is irrelevant. Typically—but not necessarily!—exact positions and angles and sizes don’t matter, for example. They need to get filtered out, while you focus on what matters.

For example, consider this problem:

Bongard problem #55

Initially, you probably see a variety of shapes, each with a tiny blob attached. Presumably, all the shapes on the left are similar in some way, and all the shapes on the right are similar in a different way. So you start looking at properties of the shapes—rounded versus angular, counting numbers of sides, looking at which direction the indentation points. But all this turns out to be irrelevant. The solution depends on an entirely different way of looking at the problem. (Answer in footnote,5 in case you are stuck!)

There’s an obvious difficulty here: if you don’t know the solution to a problem, how do you know whether your vocabulary makes the distinctions it needs? The answer is: you can’t be sure; but there are many heuristics that make finding a good formulation more likely.6

In general, though, in a multi-level search process, you need to be able to recognize incremental progress. In Bongard problems, you are searching for an adequate description vocabulary. With the more difficult problems, you find that particular descriptive terms give partial insight, and then you build on them.

But, your assessment of whether you have made partial progress is always uncertain, until you have the final solution. Hofstadter:

The way a picture is represented is always tentative. Upon the drop of a hat, a high-level description can be restructured, using all the devices of the later stages.

What happens when you get stuck? I wrote:

Vocabulary selection requires careful, non-formal observation of the real world. If a problem seems too hard, the formulation is probably wrong. Go back to reality, and look at what is going on.

This is the experience of Bongard solving: repeatedly looking at the diagrams—sometimes to deliberately check a tentative formulation; but sometimes in a less directed way, dropping back to a lower level of description, hoping that a pattern will pop out at you.

Stage 4.1

Rationality, a form of systematic thought, is “stage 4↗︎︎” of human cognitive development. Meta-rationality, or meta-systematicity, is stage 5↗︎︎.

In “A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse,” I suggested that it may be critical to human survival for more STEM-educated people to learn meta-rationality. (Not to be alarmist or anything.) That will require a “bridge” or “path.” I’ve begun working toward a curriculum for teaching meta-rationality.

As a “sandbox,” or “finger-painting version” of meta-rationality, Bongard problems may be an ideal first lesson. As an “abuse of notation,” we could imagine “stages” 4.1, 4.2, and so on, up to 4.9 and 5.0. The first module of the curriculum, 4.1, would present the various types of meta-systematic cognition in a STEM-friendly format. Maybe we can develop sandboxes for evaluating, choosing, combining, modifying, and creating systems—just as Bongard problems are a sandbox for discovering them.

(Solving large numbers of Bongard problems is not necessary; doing that is probably not particularly effective training in meta-rationality. The point is to understand how solving them is meta-rational, which probably requires working through only a dozen or two.)

The goal here is to make meta-rationality easy and fun. That is important in demonstrating its existence, and its value, before getting to the horrifying stage 4.5 realization that systems can never be made to work in their own terms, and rationality’s promises of certainty, understanding, and control are all lies. Rationalists resist explanations of meta-rationality, because they sense—and rightly fear—the nihilism↗︎︎ of 4.5. It can only be possible to lead rationalists beyond stage 4 if they have confidence that stage 5 is real and attractive: neither woo nor nihilistic despair.

Look Ma, no woo!

For stage 4 rationalists, it’s easy to mistake stage 5 meta-rationalism for stage 3 pre-rationalism. Stage 3 is long on “woo”: supernatural beliefs, pseudoscience, and wishful thinking.

The Bongard problems are a great introduction to meta-rationality for STEM people, because they definitely involve no woo. There appears—at first—to be nothing “mushy” or “metaphysical” involved.

Solving them obviously involves rationality. It feels very similar to solving ordinary puzzles, which are paradigms of systematic cognition. This illustrates the important point that stage 5 does not reject systematicity: it uses it. In fact, at this point, a rationalist might object that solving Bongard problems is clearly just rational, and that there is no meaningful distinction between “meta-rationality” and ordinary rationality. (They might invoke the Church-Turing Thesis.) I’ll come back to that later in the post. But if this is your reaction, I have succeeded in sneakily leading you 0.1 of the way along the path to stage 5.0, without triggering your stage 4.0 eternalist defenses.

Solving Bongard problems does seem to involve “intuition”—leading to flashes of “aha!”. Woomeisters love the word “intuition,” so we should be wary of it. Mostly, “intuition” just means “mental activity we don’t have a good explanation for,” or maybe “mental activity we don’t have conscious access to.” It is a useless concept, because we don’t have good explanation for much if any mental activity, nor conscious access to much of it. By these definitions, nearly everything is “intuition,” so it’s not a meaningful category. Woomeisters’ implication is that, because we don’t have good explanations for “intuition,” therefore it works according to some crackpot theory (which may involve “quantum,” “cosmic,” or “transcendent”), which proves we are all God and can live forever.

In fact, the “intuition” or “insight” involved in solving Bongard problems probably involves no special mental mechanisms.7 This is probably true of meta-rational cognition in general. It’s probably also true of rationality versus pre-rationality.8 Rational thought is not a special type of mental activity. It is a diverse collection of patterns for using your ordinary pre-rational thinking processes to accomplish particular kinds of tasks, by conforming to systems. Likewise, meta-rationality is a diverse collection of patterns of ordinary thinking that accomplish particular kinds of tasks, by manipulating systems from the outside.

We be Science peeps

Stand back! Cat iz goin to do SCIENCE!

Bongard problems are sometimes used as a simple model for science. Solving them involves using observations to create hypotheses, checking the hypotheses against empirical data, and refining your hypothesis when data disconfirm it. As a model, it’s valuable in pointing out that science is not just problem solving, it’s also problem formulating.9 Scientific problem formulating is not taught much, probably exactly because it requires going beyond stage 4.

We saw, in the “tiny blobs” problem, that re-formulation is often critical. Hofstadter writes:

There are discoveries on all levels of complexity. The Kuhnian theory that certain rare events called “paradigm shifts” mark the distinction between “normal” science and “conceptual revolutions” does not seem to work, for we can see paradigm shifts happening all throughout the system, all the time. The fluidity of descriptions ensures that paradigm shifts will take place on all scales.10

You can’t do science well without having some meta-rational skills. In fact, you probably can’t do it at all. This makes the point that meta-rationality is not some special woo thing for Enlightened Masters only. You also probably can’t survive daily life in the modern world without some ability to think rationally. However, both rationality and meta-rationality are skills. You can learn to do them better; and that gives you increasing power in certain domains.

But Church-Turing!

I intuit that some rationalist readers have had increasingly high-pressure jets of steam coming out of their ears as they read this post, because I seem to be missing the fatal flaw in the whole story.

These puzzles can obviously be solved systematically and rationally. From the Church-Turing Thesis↗︎︎, we know there’s nothing special going on! We know humans can’t do anything more than a computer can. If a human can use these supposedly “meta-systematic” types of reasoning, they are just another system. Whatever algorithm people use to solve Bongard problems, it is an algorithm, so it is a rational system.

There are two and a half answers to this.

First, the objection applies equally to rationality versus irrationality. If people are algorithms, and they are often irrational and unsystematic, then algorithms can be either rational or not; systematic or not. In that case, “rationality” and “systematicity” are properties of certain kinds of computation, but are not characteristic of computation in general. So this can’t be a valid objection to characterizing certain non-systematic sorts of computation as “meta-rational” or “meta-systematic.”

Second, the objection turns partly on the ambiguity of the terms “system” and “rationality.” These are necessarily vague, and I am not going to give precise definitions. However, by “system” I mean, roughly, a set of rules that can be printed in a book weighing less than ten kilograms, and which a person can consciously follow.11 If a person is an algorithm, it is probably an incomprehensibly vast one, which could not written concisely. It is probably also an incomprehensibly weird one, which one could not consciously follow accurately. I say “probably” because we don’t know much about how minds work, so we can’t be certain.

What we can be certain is that, because we don’t know how minds work, we can’t treat them as systems now. That is the case even if, when neuroscience progresses sufficiently, they might eventually be described that way. Even if God told us that “a human, reasoning meta-systematically, is just a system,” it would be useless in practice. Since we can’t now write out rules for meta-systematic reasoning in less than ten kilograms, we have to act, for now, as if meta-systematic reasoning is non-systematic.

The half answer is that the Church-Turing Thesis probably has almost nothing to do with thinking. Probably its only implication is that people can’t compute HALTS? or other uncomputable functions; which says nothing about irrationality, rationality, or meta-rationality. (Meta-rationality does not require computing the uncomputable!) This is a half answer because there’s more to say than fits in a blog post. A talk by Brian Cantwell Smith↗︎︎ is relevant to this, and to other themes of Meaningness, and is excellent.

AI, Bongard, and human-complete problems

Bongard problems were originally designed as a test domain for artificial intelligence, in the mid-’60s, when AI still looked easy. There has been very limited progress.12 Despite many AI researchers finding the problems fascinating, few have tackled them, because on reflection they come to seem extremely difficult. The number of properties and relationships that must be recognized and represented is large, and their possible combinations produce an exponentially increasing number of feasible hypotheses at each successive level of description.

Such progress as we’ve had in AI since 1990 has come almost entirely from brute force. Computers are so fast that combinatorial explosions are less daunting now than during the golden days of the 1970s and ’80s, when most known AI algorithms were invented. Could Bongard problems now be brute-forced, by generating and testing billions of hypotheses, where earlier programs were only able to consider dozens? I don’t know. I’m tempted to try! But I’ll explain reasons to think that can’t work.

A “human-complete” problem is one that is so hard that if a computer could do that, it could do anything a person can do. Any solution to the problem would also have to be a complete solution to emulating human intelligence.

Early on, artificial intelligence researchers concentrated on trying to solve human-complete problems, because they thought AI would be easy, so they might as well just do the whole thing at once, rather than wasting time implementing subsets of human-level intelligence. Once we realized AI is hard, we took the opposite approach: avoid human-complete problems, because we know those are currently infeasible.

The best candidate for a human-complete problem is carrying on an ordinary undirected conversation over a text chat connection.13 Chatting is likely human-complete because it’s so open-ended. Essentially any topic could come up in a causal conversation, and then you’d have to say something sensible about it. (If you are the sort of person reading this post, you might even want to talk about Bongard problems and how to solve them!)

It seems Bongard problems might also be human-complete—or even “intelligence-complete.”

Bongard problems have a quality of universality to them. They depend on a sense of simplicity which is not just limited to earthbound human beings. The skill of solving them lies very close to the core of “pure” intelligence.14

The reason, again, is that almost anything might be relevant. The kinds of concepts and reasoning needed is unbounded. For instance, this problem involves totally different considerations from the ones you’ve seen so far:

Bongard problem #199

(Stumped? See the footnote!15)

A program to solve Bongard problems would need, for instance, basic “intuitive” physics knowledge. In fact, we could probably encode any kind of intelligence or knowledge into a Bongard problem.16 This makes it plausible that Bongard problems are, indeed, human-complete.

Check this out: a meta-Bongard-problem, about Bongard problems!

Bongard problem #200

Here each of the twelve boxes contains a Bongard-type problem (each with only six examples, rather than the usual twelve). How are the six problems on the left different from the six on the right? (Solution in footnote.17)

The likely human-completeness of Bongard problems doesn’t mean a program couldn’t, in principle, do as well as people; only that we are currently very far from knowing how to write one.

“Deep learning” is the only interesting advance in AI since 1990. It’s mostly just brute force, but some of the applications have been impressive. I’m seriously interested in understanding its power and limits. (Some of the hype suggests that human-level AI is imminent. I don’t think so.) I’m pretty sure deep learning would get nowhere with Bongard problems. I would be very surprised and impressed and excited if I were wrong!

Meta-rationality, nebulosity, and metaphysics

Spaced-out cat in space

I hope I’ve persuaded you now that meta-rationality is emotionally safe. I hope you are intrigued: you can see that “meta-rationality” is plausibly a thing, and useful, and you can do it, and you want to learn more about how. Developing that curiosity is the goal of the “4.1” module of the meta-rationality curriculum. In “4.2,” we can look at ways of developing meta-systematic skills.

But now I want to scare you a little. (Probably this isn’t good pedagogy. Probably I should withhold the nasty surprise as long as possible…)

Deviously, I have led you over the edge of a cliff. You have started walking on a cloud, and you haven’t noticed because you haven’t looked down. At 4.5, you will see that there is no ground beneath you, and then will you fall into the abyss of nihilism. You will fall, that is, unless you have learned the skills of cloud-treading! They are one of the main parts of this curriculum—precisely because I want to give you the tools to walk confidently over that chasm.

Nebulosity” is the central theme of Meaningness. Literally, the word means “cloud-like-ness.” I use it to refer to the inherently vague, ambiguous, and fluid character of all meanings. “Eternalism↗︎︎” is the denial↗︎︎ of nebulosity: it is the insistence that meanings can be made precise, definite, clear, and unchanging. Eternalism claims that meaning has some ultimate foundation: an eternal ordering principle↗︎︎ that supports our understanding. Rationalism is a species of eternalism.

Eternalism is false. There is no ultimate grounding for meaning. Our knowledge and understanding can only ever be vague, ambiguous, and fluid. This is not merely a matter of uncertainty; it is that the concepts we use, our vocabularies for description, are always nebulous to some degree. Reality itself is also always nebulous, to some degree.

We are always already walking on clouds, because there is no ground anywhere. There is only ever an illusion of ground—and once we are free of that illusion, vast new territories open up for exploration.

This recognition is the midpoint, and the key, to the transition from stage 4 to stage 5. The rest is learning to be comfortable with groundlessness, and gaining means for navigating the realms beyond systematicity. That is the domain of the complete stance↗︎︎, which avoids both eternalism and nihilism because it conjures with both nebulosity and pattern↗︎︎.18

Whoa! Dude! You’ve wandered off into space! What has this got to do with Bongard problems?

The “crispness” of the Bongard diagrams is deceptive. I wrote above that:

There appears—at first—to be nothing “mushy” or “metaphysical” involved.

Consider this mushy problem:

Bongard problem #97

The answer is obvious: triangles versus circles. Except that most of them aren’t. We have to see things that objectively aren’t triangles or circles as triangles and circles.

Hofstadter describes this as the “fluidity of descriptions,” “play,” “slippage,” and “bending.”

One has to be able to “bend” concepts, when it is appropriate. Nothing should be absolutely rigid. On the other hand, things shouldn’t be so wishy-washy that nothing has any meaning at all, either. The trick is knowing when and how to slip one concept into another.19

This navigates between the Scylla of eternalism (rigidity, or fixation↗︎︎ of patterns) and the Charybdis of nihilism (meaninglessness).

And now… the dreaded metaphysics. I’m going to show you three problems in a row. The first two are easy; the third, not so much. Give it a serious try!

Bongard problem #85
Bongard problem #86
Bongard problem #87

I don’t want to spoil this for you by discussing the solution immediately, in case you are reading this before finishing. So let’s pause for a brief lyrical interlude.

     If he had seen this dainty creature,
     Golden as saffron in every feature,
     How could a High Creator bear
     To part with anything so fair?
     Suppose he shut his eyes? Oh, no:
     How could he then have made her so?
—Which proves the world was not created:
Buddhist philosophy is vindicated.

(That’s by the rationalist epistemologist and logician Dharmakirti↗︎︎.)

The answer to the third problem is “four line segments vs. five.”

“But,” you may object, “two of the examples on the right have only three line segments!” And that’s because I led you down a garden path again. The first two problems set you up to think about line segments in wrong ways for the third. What counts as a line segment in the third problem is “a straight bit leading up to a junction or termination.” The first example on the right side has three horizontal “segments,” split at the junctions, plus the two vertical ones; the H-shaped one has four vertical segments, plus one horizontal one.

Here is another problem of the same sort. I spent ten minutes trying, and failing, to solve it. You may find it easier, knowing that the solution is similar to the previous one.

Bongard problem #90

(Solution in footnote.20)

The point of these examples is that what counts as an “object” depends on the context. This was true in the “mushy” problem above, too. One of the “circles” can also be described as a group of triangles. Is it one object, or many? Neither answer is “objectively true”; which one is useful depends on what you are doing.

This is a metaphysical, or ontological, observation. Ontology asks: what kinds of objects are there?

And part of the answer is: objects, and their boundaries, are not objective features of the world. They are necessarily nebulous: cloud-like. Reality does not come divided up into bits; we have to do that. But we can’t do it arbitrarily, and just impose whatever boundaries we like, because reality is also patterned. The individuation of objects, and placement of boundaries, is a collaboration between self and other.

This is much more true of everyday physical reality than of Bongard problems (which are, after all, relatively crisp). I began to explain that in “Boundaries, objects, and connections.” That page asks: is a jam jar one object, or two, or three? It depends on your purposes at the time you look at it. Where, in a mixture, does jam stop and yogurt begin? There is no objective answer. Eventually that page will introduce a large discussion of how this works, and what it implies.

If you think I’m wrong, stupid, or crazy, how about Richard Feynman? Check out his discussion of the vagueness of objects here.

That inherent vagueness is central to the Meaningness explanation of meaning, and to “fluid” or “meta-systematic” cognition. You may be able to begin to see why now!

If you’d like further hints, you can read Alexandre Linhares’ “A glimpse at the metaphysics of Bongard problems↗︎︎.” Linhares collaborated with, and built on the work of, Hofstadter and Foundalis. He also built on the work of Brian Cantwell Smith, whose talk↗︎︎ I recommended above. Smith’s On the Origin of Objects↗︎︎ develops an account similar to that I’ll explain in Meaningness. (Any decade now.)

This also connects closely—and not coincidentally!—with the work on active, task-directed machine vision in my Ph.D. thesis↗︎︎. It’s a model for how we use visual processing to individuate objects. More about that later, too, I hope!

  • 1. In the first hard problem, in the left group, one circle passes through the center of the other one; on the right, neither passes through the center of the other. In the left group of the second one, the points are spaced equidistantly on the horizontal axis; in the right group, they are equidistant vertically.
  • 2. It’s pp. 646-662.
  • 3. It would be interesting to know how much influence GEB had on “How To Think”—either the original, abandoned, early-’90s project; or my blog post from three years ago. I’m reasonably certain I wasn’t conscious of any influence, but the book had a huge impact on me near the beginning of my engagement with AI.
  • 4. I’ve mashed together some phrases from different parts of “How To Think” here, so you won’t find exactly this passage—or some of the other “quotes”—there.
  • 5. On the left, the blob is a bit counterclockwise from the indentation; on the right, it’s clockwise.
  • 6. Quoted from “How To Think.” Hofstadter and I both suggest that these heuristics are important and numerous, but it is a weakness in both our accounts that we don’t actually give good examples! He says this would be “very hard,” at least when attempting sufficient definiteness to program an AI system (p. 661). I’m somewhat more optimistic, at least about explaining them adequately for human use.
  • 7. See GEB p. 661 on this.
  • 8. I say “probably” because we don’t actually know how any sort of thinking works.
  • 9. Science is, perhaps even more importantly, also problem choosing. Even less has been written about problem choosing than about problem formulating. I have good intentions to rectify that at some point.
  • 10. p. 660; emphasis added.
  • 11. All rationality is systematic, but not all systems are rational. Sharia, traditional Chinese medicine, and waterfall development methodology are all definitely systems, with elaborate rules and expert disputation over geeky details. Plausibly, these systems are not rational, however. A “rational” system is one that is “good” or “effective” according to some criterion. There are various theories of what the right criterion should be. From a meta-rational perspective, there is no best such criterion; different ones have different advantages.
  • 12. By far the best work is the 2006 Ph.D. thesis↗︎︎ of Harry Foundalis, supervised by Hofstadter. Foundalis also maintains the catalog of Bongard problems I linked earlier. Interestingly, he stopped working on AI↗︎︎ for several years because he was concerned about its ethical risks.
  • 13. This is often described as the “Turing Test↗︎︎,” although Turing’s original version involved a person trying to pass as the opposite sex. This tells us quite a lot about Turing, but perhaps not so much about artificial intelligence.
  • 14. GEB, pp. 661-2, lightly paraphrased.
  • 15. The configurations on the left are stable, taken as depicting physical objects in gravity; the ones on the right would fall over.
  • 16. Foundalis’ thesis provides various interesting examples. Generally, it’s considered that a proper Bongard problem depends only on “general” knowledge and intelligence; it’s not “fair” to test specifics such as understanding of Medieval musical instruments—although you could indeed build that into a Bongard-style problem, with photographs of lutes, gitterns, citoles, and racketts.
  • 17. The problems on the left concern individual properties of objects; those on the right concern numbers of objects.
  • 18. I’m talking Dzogchen↗︎︎ here, covertly.
  • 19. GEB, pp. 654-5.
  • 20. This one is about the number of “groups” of white blobs. A black blob separates groups. On the left there are three groups; on the right, four.

The new politics of meaning

Torn EU flag
Image (CC) Andrew Barclay

The politics of meaning are swirling into a new configuration. Since the 1960s, “values issues” have defined stable left and right political coalitions. Most people dutifully lined up with one side or the other, and most political questions were forced to align with a fixed left vs. right opposition.

The 2016 American Presidential campaign, and the UK Brexit vote, have split both the “left” and “right” internally, each into roughly equal halves. A new basic division of political opinion has emerged—in these countries, at least. But what is it? 

I suspect the fault line in the new politics reflects the communal versus systematic modes↗︎︎ of relating to meaning. This realignment offers both fearful risks and hopeful opportunities—because both modes are partly right and partly wrong. Although a communal/systematic split could be catastrophic, it may also point the way to a new mode that heals the fundamental crisis of meaningness that has plagued the West for a hundred years.

 

A return to the pre-’60s politics of class?

A common current analysis invokes socio-economic class:

  • The new division pits the working and lower-middle classes against the upper-middle and elite classes. It is driven by resentment of growing economic inequality and of the social contempt of the elites for the lower classes. 
  • Since the 1960s, elites have used trivial culture-war “values issues” to distract the lower classes from the weighty economic policy decisions that are the proper subject of politics.1 Elites—who pretend to be either on the left or right, but are united in pursuit of their class interest—kept their lower-class followers divided from each other with bear-baiting ideological goads. 
  • Finally, now, the lower classes have caught onto the game and are in revolt.

This is probably partly accurate—but I suspect not quite right.

  • Out of more than a hundred socio-economic variables, the best predictor↗︎︎ for Remain in the Brexit vote was holding a college degree. Income also correlated with the vote, but less strongly.
  • College degrees also seem2 to predict the Republican primary vote better than income↗︎︎.

College degrees predict social class better than economic class. This might suggest that “snooty elite contempt↗︎︎” is a larger factor than income inequality. That seems dubious. 

I will suggest a different explanation: that college degrees predict support for systems as such.

The politics of incoherence

Before getting to that alternative analysis, let’s look at another pair of unexpected political quakes. Some readers may be old enough to remember Occupy and the Tea Party. These movements were strikingly similar, although one was on “the far left” and the other on “the far right.” Both were highly upset about something, and wanted immediate change, but—it was much noted at the time—neither could say what they wanted, why they should get it, or how anyone could give it to them.

These movements initiated the politics of incoherence. Up to this point, it was taken for granted that political statements had to make sense. They might be based on invented “facts,” or use fallacious reasoning; but it was a social convention that they had to at least sound like rational arguments. 

Occupy and the Tea Party were exhilarating, because suddenly you could just say what you thought, without any need to justify it. You could simply ignore your opponents’ claims, without any tedious responsibility for working out counter-arguments. 

This was based on the accurate recognition that political arguments are pointless. They never convince anyone. Everyone now understands that interest groups will always pay TV pundits to spout statistical factoids and logical-sounding arguments in favor of anything, no matter how wrong. The moral↗︎︎ duty to regurgitate those no longer seems compelling.

Similarly, many have commented on the incoherence of the 2016 Brexit and American Presidential campaigns. It is not that that one side or the other is wrong. It is that key participants no longer even pretend to make sense. There is no longer a social norm that politics should make sense.

In America, both Trump and Sanders practice the politics of incoherence↗︎︎. They are unapologetic about ignoring facts, and feel no obligation↗︎︎ to offer realistic policy proposals. That stuff is ancient history. Politics isn’t about sense, facts, or policy anymore.

“It’s the system!”

Occupy and the Tea Party couldn’t explain what they wanted, but it’s clear what they were against: “The System.” They recognized that politics-as-usual will always keep The System in power. The System doesn’t care about “left” and “right.” Those are just entertainment for the masses: two football teams who play the same game by the same rules, indistinguishable apart from the colors on their jerseys.

The American Presidential campaign was “supposed” to be Bush versus Clinton, both boringly loyal agents of The System, neither of whom would have changed anything much. Both parties were unexpectedly split, to an unprecedented extent, by incoherent, anti-System candidates.

There is no “The System,” actually—that’s conspiracy theory stuff. What we have instead are numerous interlocking, sometimes-competing systems: governments, laws, corporations, the media, the professions, churches and religions, schools and universities, hospitals and transportation utilities. 

These intricate institutions all run on the systematic mode of relating to meaning. I have explained that in detail: in historical terms here, and in social and psychological terms here↗︎︎. In summary, the systematic mode demands that society operate according to a structure of justification, built from chains of reasons. It is “rational” at least in that everything has to make sense, in terms of “this, therefore that.” Ideally, society operates as a well-maintained machine. 

The enormous improvements in material conditions over the past few centuries are due mainly to systematicity. That’s the good part. 

The bad part is that the systematic mode is profoundly psychologically unnatural. For many people it seems dehumanizing, alienating, incomprehensible, senseless, meaningless, and utterly immoral. This has been obvious for a hundred years.

Renegotiating the relationship between individuals and society has been a pressing—but unsolved—problem since at least the First World War. It reached a breaking point in the 1960s and ’70s, when the two countercultures, of the left and right, proposed alternative reforms.3 Both were partly accepted, and an uneasy synthesis of the two has been the de facto mainstream social form for half a century. Until now: the new politics suggests that the deal offered to individuals by society is no longer adequate.

Systematicity was always imposed by elites. Few people wanted it, and most would have rejected it if they could. The majority implicitly mistook material progress as something that just happens, not fully recognizing that medicine and jobs and roads and food and the internet depend on vast chains of “because.” Research by Robert Kegan, a psychologist whose work has heavily influenced my thinking on this topic, suggests that roughly two thirds↗︎︎ of Americans are unable to fully cope with the demands of systematic institutions. They are↗︎︎ “developmentally traditional people in a modern world.” 

Undergraduate education explains the systematic structures of justification,4 which is why, I think, the new politics correlates so strongly with lack of a college degree.

The revolt against systematicity—if that is what we are seeing—is genuinely democratic↗︎︎. This is good. People who cope poorly with systematicity have, until now, been denied any voice; they had no platform to speak, and in elections were offered only a choice between parties and candidates who all took systematicity for granted. That was anti-democratic and unfair. The internet, particularly social media, now gives them a platform—and the American primary election has given them a candidate.

What’s the alternative?

The natural human alternative is the communal mode↗︎︎: unstructured, egalitarian, empathic, local, tribal, familiar, and comfortable. This mode—I’ve also called it “choiceless”—feels profoundly right. We evolved to live in such societies; they fit our psychology in a way systematic ones cannot. 

The problem is, the communal mode cannot sustain life on a planet of billions of people, much less provide the material benefits, entertainment, and understanding we are used to.

The problem is, we currently have no workable alternative to systematicity. This makes anti-systematic politics entirely nihilistic↗︎︎. Occupy, the Tea Party, Leave, Trump, and Sanders endorse communal-mode values—quite rightly—but have no practical vision for how society could better support them. Even many of their supporters freely admit that their votes are simply against the systematic status quo, not for something better. Their attitude is “we want to end politics, because we always lose anyway.” This risks destroying the conditions for civilized life, in a rage that institutions are imperfect.

On the other hand, again, the status quo is not merely imperfect, but—for many—intolerable. Fortunately, the systematic mode’s claim to ultimate justification↗︎︎ is bogus. This is widely understood by elites, but they see no better alternative, and—cynically—many have merely milked systems as their grounding increasingly disintegrates. Particularly in the past decade, more and more, the developed economies are devoted to rent-seeking↗︎︎: systems that stand in the way of people doing useful things, and charge fees to let us past.5 The “mainstream” American Presidential candidates are widely viewed as values-free puppets of rent-seeking economic elites.

The systematic mode can, should, must be superseded—not by the communal mode, but by something that combines benefits of both. I think that is possible; I describe it as the “fluid mode.” (I haven’t given a proper account of this yet. There are beginnings here and here↗︎︎ and here.)

A revolt against the systematic mode may force progress toward fluidity—if we escape simple nihilistic destruction.

  • 1. My chapter on the ’60s-’80s countercultural mode will cover the history this soon. I hope.
  • 2. The demographics of Trump supporters is itself a contested political issue, so it’s hard to be confident of facts based on casual web searches that lead to mass media reports. Detractors want to prove that Trump supporters are stupid; supporters want to prove that it’s socially acceptable to vote for him even if you are college-educated.
  • 3. A revival of class politics would be a return to the pre–1960s political landscape. Interestingly, an anti-systematic politics would be a return to the 1960s, which pitted the anti-systematic counterculture against the systematic Establishment. The countercultural left became the new systematic establishment in the 1970s—as I will recount Real Soon Now.
  • 4. Unfortunately, as I explained in a recent post, this is decreasingly true, due to obfuscatory postmodernism. This may be one reason for the rise of anti-systematic politics: even many of the college-educated now fail to understand the value of systematicity.
  • 5. Two obvious American examples: banks charge a couple of percent every time someone gives someone else non-physical money; technologically, this cannot cost them more than a small fraction of a percent. The health finance industry takes several percent of GDP, in exchange for preventing people from getting medical care. In the UK, Remain’s argument that Britain was economically better off in than out may have been correct, but it’s also true that the EU creates elaborate artificial barriers to voluntary exchanges, for the benefit of protected economic interests.

The personal is political

Protester drops a bra in the trash at the 1968 Miss America Pageant
Protesting the 1968 Miss America Pageant

The slogan “the personal is political,” originating in 1960s feminism, encapsulates both countercultures’ political agenda. Society had to change to accommodate the self; and political action was the way to reform the social structure.

Between them, the two countercultures shoved aside existing power dynamics and created reorganized coalitions which have dominated American politics ever since. Though both movements expired long ago, the struggle between them left a culture war that refuses to die.

A previous page, “Renegotiating self and society,” summarized the countercultures’ political program. The systematic mode↗︎︎ had imposed a hard division between self and society, which caused alienation, angst, and anomie. The countercultures addressed these problems by blurring the public/private boundary: the personal is political↗︎︎.

They sought to replace the artificial, seemingly-arbitrary social and personal requirements of the systematic mode with ones they considered natural. They tried to reorient society away from formal, systematic roles toward natural ones: family, unstructured friendships, and local communities. The monist counterculture thought humanistic, egalitarian norms would be more natural. The dualist counterculture thought godly, hierarchical norms would be more natural.

“Authenticity” meant bringing the private and public selves into alignment. This was the obvious response to the painful gap between them. However, it represents a partial reversion toward the choiceless mode↗︎︎. Systems can be unjust, inhumane, rigid, dysfunctional, or outright inimical to human survival. Unfortunately, we still don’t know how to live without them. The choiceless mode feels right but it can’t feed a world of billions of people. The countercultures mostly recognized this, and did seek only to replace existing systems, not to return to a pre-systematic state.1

Merging ethics, politics, religion, and identity

Both countercultures unified politics and morality: the public and private manifestations of “ought.” Merging them helped collapse the self/society boundary. This led to a massive revision of American political, class, and religious systems—as we’ll see in the next page.

The countercultures perceived anomie↗︎︎: a breakdown in morality due to broad recognition that public norms were discordant with private values. Both called for a reform of social norms to bring them closer to ethical norms, and for norms to be strengthened—that is, better enforced against wrong-doers.

Power struggles between economic interest groups were the heart of politics before the countercultures. Conflict between the working class majority and the bourgeois minority drove the main ideological movements, and threatened social collapse. Counterculturalists recognized that such conflicts have no “right” resolution. Everyone may honestly believe their group should win, but that’s nothing more than self-interest.

Eternalism↗︎︎ demands an ultimate↗︎︎ answer to political questions: there must be an unambiguously correct, clear, simple solution once you see it. A contest of selfish brute political force won’t deliver that. Ethics—a force beyond self-interest—must provide the right answer for politics.

Of course, the countercultures disagreed sharply on some ethical questions. So how do we know that our ethics are right, and theirs are wrong? Religion. Religion gives transcendent, unchallengeable justification for ethical claims. And so both countercultures merged politics with religion, as well as with ethics.2 Not only did they reform politics along religious lines, they also turned their politics into pseudo-religions.

Spiritualizing politics, and politicizing everyday personal interactions, was not an altogether bad thing. Sometimes ethical considerations should trump power politics. Sometimes political considerations should alter personal behavior. However, combined with eternalism (absolutism) and universalism (intolerance of diversity of views), the merger has poisoned both politics and everyday life.

Countercultural politics split Americans into two warring tribes. Lack of distinctions between ethics, politics, and religion is a main cause of the bitterness of culture war. When politics is inseparable from morality, your political opponents do not just have different economic incentives, they are evil: immoral, sub-human, demonic. That makes negotiation and compromise impossible.

As politics came to define what it meant to be a good person, many came to define their selves by membership in one counterculture, and rejection of the other. Political success would require solidarity, and both sides promoted the “brotherhood of all counterculture participants.” However, identification with the monist or dualist tribe eventually proved to be an inadequate basis for self.

The monist personal was political

Pro-choice rally
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Dave Bledsoe

The New Left↗︎︎ was the monist counterculture’s political program. The Old Left had mainly promoted the economic interest of the working class. The New Left mainly promoted a middle-class personal morality, and mostly lost interest in working class and economic issues.3

Monist politics addressed the crisis of the self: the problems of alienation, angst, and anomie. It started from an improbable synthesis of Marxism, Freudianism, and existentialism—the most important secular systems of meaning in the mid-twentieth century. These systems utterly contradict each other, and also contradict central tenets of the New Left. However, countercultural intellectuals somehow combined them in an ideology of complete liberation of the individual from social norms. Given this incoherent and absolutist origin, it’s not surprising that many of the New Left’s social proposals were simplistic utopian fantasies.

Loosening social norms

In the beginning, the New Left sought mainly to loosen existing social norms, rather than to replace them. The 1950s had been a period of unusually rigid expectations for conformity, which counterculturalists found intolerable. Many of these norms seemed arbitrary, or obsolete, or simply served the selfish interests of elites. Just throwing them off would be a good start. The monist counterculture was, at first, remarkably anti-authoritarian.

After some experience of the consequences of moral breakdown, the counterculture shifted to advocating social reform based on new norms. These were supposed to be more human and natural, in contrast with the industrial, artificial norms of the systematic mode. Leaders intended to create a supportive and egalitarian society. Not everyone got with the program immediately. So, New Left organizations increasingly demanded “discipline,” and monist culture increasingly insisted on correct “consciousness.” The left gradually left behind its New anti-authoritarianism.

Sexual liberation

Sex is perhaps the most personal and private of activities. Before the countercultural merger of the public and private spheres, sex would never have been considered a “political” issue.4

“Victorian morality” was still the official public ideology of sex and family life in the 1960s. For decades, it had been increasingly ignored↗︎︎ in private—the very definition of hypocrisy and anomie. Improved contraceptive technology and safe, effective treatments for all the STDs of the time removed rational justifications for restrictive sexual norms.

Herbert Marcuse↗︎︎ was probably the most important New Left theorist. His Eros and Civilization↗︎︎ rejects Freud’s pessimistic conclusion in Civilization and Its Discontents↗︎︎ (which I discussed previously) that the self, particularly its sexual desires, must be subordinated to the social system. Modern political repression, Marcuse argued, is based on sexual repression. For the New Left, the sexual revolution↗︎︎ was inseparable from the struggle against oppressive corporations and an oppressive state.

This program was partly successful. By the mid-1970s, when the monist counterculture petered out, a majority of Americans had adopted a much more liberal sexual morality than was publicly acceptable in the early ’60s.

Family

The counterculture considered the Victorian family oppressive for all participants, and set out to dissolve it.

For children, they said, the family was a training ground for a future role as subordinates in an oppressive society. The family’s purpose was to create “authoritarian personalities.” Victorian family theorists had made this entirely explicit: children must be taught unquestioning obedience to arbitrary parental authority in order that they will make “good citizens” as adults. New Left theorists believed this explained the acquiescence of the German and Russian people to Nazi and Stalinist oppression. Families make fascists. In America, families turned out obedient employees, cogs in the machinery of capitalism, whose childhood resignation to emotional abuse also made them joyless, compulsive consumers.

The demand that all men marry and support a wife and children doomed many to an onerous and unwanted breadwinner role. The Beat movement—prologue to hippies—was largely a revolt against work, which implied a revolt against marriage. Hippie men too wanted to sleep around, get high, and listen to music—not spend all their time in a mind-destroying job in order to pay for children they hadn’t asked for.

Hippie women were, likewise, mostly not looking forward to a lifetime stuck at home washing dishes and changing diapers. On the other hand, many discovered that the new social norm that they should have sex with any hippie man who wanted them was not so great either. Some did have children, and then hippie rejection of breadwinning became a problem.

Meanwhile, many more-mainstream women found they enjoyed their careers, and relished the freedom from dependency on men a paycheck gave them. Second-wave feminism↗︎︎ began as their political program to end workplace discrimination. Feminism is now hazily remembered as part of the ’60s counterculture, probably because they were lumped together as enemies by the dualist counterculture. The reality was more complicated: feminism was long resisted by most male leaders of the New Left, and of the monist religious and cultural movements.

Community

The Victorian isolated nuclear family ideal was called “traditional,” but it was only a century old. Anthropologists pointed out that it is culturally unusual. Extended families are more typical. These are usually closely woven into broader clans and villages. Children are normally raised by many adults. Unmarried teenage girls also do much of the work, keeping small children out of adults’ hair, and buffering them from excessively harsh parental discipline.

Marcuse, and other countercultural theorists, advocated dissolving nuclear family bonds and replacing them with extended social networks.

Hippie communes put this theory into action. They address both the problem of work and the problem of family. To avoid work, we all move to a remote farm, where we’re out of reach of The System, and we grow all our own food and make everything else we need.5 There we get back in touch with the cycles of nature, live life on a human scale, and do just enough wholesome, meaningful work to meet our own needs—instead of slaving for capitalist exploiters. We hold property in common, so everyone has everything they need. We raise children communally, so they always have many loving adults to turn to.

In almost every case, this ends disastrously, usually within a year or so. The founders have high-minded cooperative ideals, but no one actually wants to plow the field, wash the dishes, or feed other people’s children—and if work is not enforced, gradually everyone does less. (This is especially true of communes whose promise is freedom from work!)

Worse, in the absence of strong social norms, communes attract parasites: freeloaders and sociopaths. The brotherhood of all counterculturalists implies that anyone with long hair can come live on the farm. Soon a lot of long-haired guys show up who expect to be fed and laid and supplied with drugs, in exchange for doing nothing. Often they are surly or even violent as well. We are very nice cooperative egalitarian monist people, and they invariably have some sob story for why they can’t be expected to pull their weight, so none of us wants to tell them to get out. No one even feels they have any authority to do so. After a few months, the productive members of the commune give up and leave; and then so do the parasites, when the free food, sex, and drugs run out.

Communes that succeed have strong social norms. Living there requires high commitment to specific values, beyond the countercultural ones. They are mainly interested in being left alone to do their specific thing, rather than trying to impose it on society at large. These make them subcultural↗︎︎, not countercultural. Unfortunately, during the countercultural era, successful communes mainly ended up being dominated by charismatic authoritarians (who had the gumption to toss out the parasites) and became exploitative cults. Others, more benign, were run by leaders with strong organizational skills, who imposed formal roles and systems and found a profitable non-agrarian economic basis for their community.

The “brotherhood” fantasy, that the counterculture as a whole could function as a community, was a clear failure. Mostly its egalitarian ideals undermined even attempts to create local communities.

The dualist personal was political

Pro-life rally
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Wikipedia

Social conservatives, as well as liberals, found the systematic mode’s private/public split intolerable. It enabled pervasive moral hypocrisy, for instance in the form of “Sunday Christians↗︎︎,” who said the right things in public, but whose private lives were unaffected by religion. Your public and private lives must match to make you an authentic Christian. This is what “born again” meant to many: that you walk the talk.

A godless society makes that walk hard going. There were plenty of sinners in the ’50s, but at least mainstream society expected basic Christian morality. By the mid-’70s, atheists and perverts had taken over America. Hollywood and universities and the government, and even many supposedly Christian churches, all promoted sin. The dualist political program was a grassroots uprising for basic decency, for religious freedom, for taking America back to the traditional values of its founders. (Or so its leaders said.)

They cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, as one of the main reasons for launching their counterculture. The Court’s reasoning in this case was based on the right to privacy: affirming the public/private distinction. The personal, said the Court, was not political.

The founders of the Moral Majority—the foremost dualist-counterculture political organization—were also motivated by their disappointment at “born again” President Jimmy Carter’s rejection of “the personal is political.” Carter refused to publicly oppose abortion despite his private conservative Evangelical religious beliefs.

With the Supreme Court and the President advocating moral hypocrisy, a counter-cultural politics was imperative. The dualist political program worked to collapse the public and private in order to return society to natural, godly norms. This project complemented the dualist religious movement’s technologies of the self, which strengthened souls against the temptations of the new hedonism, nihilism, and atheism.

Large-family values

Dualists agreed with monists that the “traditional family” was not working. They wrote the opposite prescription, though: it should be strengthened and supported, not dissolved.

“Family values” was the central dualist counterculture slogan. For liberals, the list of issues this covers is puzzling. It seems senseless and disparate, and mostly to have nothing to do with families, although weirdly obsessed with sex. If there is any common theme, perhaps it is “don’t enjoy yourself!”—and it is hard to see how that is anything other than mean-spirited.

Social conservatives seem incapable of explaining “family values” other than in Biblical terms. Such justifications are nonsense, because social conservatives ignore most Biblical prohibitions, and they only started caring about the main “family values” in the 1970s.6 Before then, conservative Protestants mostly thought abortion was fine. Sodomy had always been a sin, but an obscure one; fundamentalists had been far more concerned to preach against drinking, dancing, and gambling. The “family values” agenda must have some other, powerful, unstated motivation. Baffled liberals may attribute it to pure malice: hatred rooted in innate evil.

I’ve recently come to a tentative, alternative understanding that makes me much more sympathetic.7 If we take the dualist political agenda as promoting large families, its specific positions suddenly make sense. In fact, conservatives do have significantly more children than liberals, on average.

Three reproductive strategies have been common in America in the past half-century:8

  1. Opportunistic mating without marriage, and with minimal parental investment—especially, minimal support by fathers. This is most common among the underclass and lower working class.
  2. Early marriage (teens or early twenties); many children, starting shortly after marriage; emphasis on life-long monogamy; and high total parental investment, spread over many children. This large-family strategy became typical mainly of the upper working class and lower middle class.
  3. Marriage and children delayed to late twenties or into the thirties in order to accumulate resources (university education and establishing a career); multiple sexual relationships before marriage; fewer children; highest per-child parental investment. This is typical of the upper middle class.

The “family values” agenda makes sense when interpreted as promoting the large-family, early-marriage strategy as against both of the others. As a political movement, it attempts to get the government to support its reproductive strategy, and to hinder, prohibit, or punish the others.

Take abortion, the foremost issue of the religious right.9 Those pursuing the early strategy have little use for abortion, because they intend to have lots of children as soon as they can. On the other hand, unintended early childbirth ruins the delayed strategy by interrupting education or professional career development. Before legal abortion, it forced many women to abandon their life plans altogether. It set many men back in their careers as well, because to support an unwanted child they had to maximize current income, instead of pursuing education or prestigious but low-paid training positions. Conversely, if you are currently unable to support children at all—often true for those who adopt the opportunistic strategy—abortion may be pragmatically necessary. If we assume that sabotaging the opportunistic and delayed strategies are the point of the anti-abortion movement, its moral condemnation of both “welfare queens” and “selfish career women” makes sense.10

The large-family, early strategy requires enormous personal sacrifice. If you have six children, then realistically one parent does have to stay home, taking care of them all day every day. Many people enjoy caring for children, but doing it almost your entire adult life, with little time to enjoy or express yourself, is a long hard grind, and emotionally restricting. Financially, in addition to per-child costs, the family has to give up on the potential second income. There is less parental attention and less money per child than in smaller families; preparing and paying for college may be infeasible, for instance. For the employed parent, the financial stress and responsibility, the risk of catastrophe if you lose your job, and the impossibility of taking time off, are equally grinding.

Social liberals should recognize that sticking to this plan, in the face of constant temptations to irresponsibility, is genuinely noble. Religious conservatives congratulate themselves on being “moral” because they are “godly.” Liberal atheists should recognize that they are moral: not because they follow the Bible, but because they work extremely hard, for the sake of others, in difficult circumstances, when they do have alternative options.

In fact, because the big-family strategy is so grueling, it needs intensive memetic support. For many people, switching to strategy 1 (abandoning your wife and children, having an affair, getting high instead of cleaning the house, spending money on something fun the family can’t afford) looks attractive all too often. It is easier, more enjoyable in the short run, and might seem rational for the longer term, too. Constant reminders of absolute, eternalistic↗︎︎ religious justifications help keep you on the straight and narrow. A community—a church—that reinforces the message with social confirmation and peer pressure, checking every week to see that you have not gone astray, is invaluable. And, the Christian technologies of the self were designed to make the large-family strategy more emotionally bearable.

The delayed, small-family strategy is the most personally rewarding, for those capable of it. However, it only makes sense if you have something better to do with your twenties. That means college, and the kinds of jobs that require eighty-hour-a-week work at low pay during your twenties in exchange for prestige or a very high salary later: entry-level positions as an academic, doctor, lawyer, or investment banker.11 Mostly, these are inaccessible for young people from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. If you are going to work forty hours a week on low-skill jobs for the rest of your life, you might as well have children when you are twenty.

On the other hand, if you are not capable of earning enough money to support a wife and children, strategy 2 is out of reach, and you are stuck with reproductive opportunism.

So it is not surprising that the religious right was—and still is—rooted in the upper working class and lower middle class.12 And this explains its sudden emergence in the 1970s. Economic changes during the 1960s made strategies 1 and 3 both work better than they had. Increased workplace opportunity for women, general prosperity, and more generous welfare support made strategy-1 single motherhood much more feasible and attractive than it had been. Increasing subsidies for college tuition, plus a widening gap between blue-collar and professional/managerial salaries, made the delayed-marriage strategy 3 both easier to access and more attractive.

This meant that people pursuing the large-family strategy saw greater competition from the others than previously. It also meant many were tempted to switch. That could be threatening in several ways. At a practical level, as an example, for a man, it was more likely that your wife would leave and support herself. (This is why wives’ obedience and dependency were so heavily promoted, and why conservatives oppose workplace equality.)

Psychologically, the shifts caused great cognitive dissonance. Strategy 2 had been the best option for most people for decades—but maybe now it wasn’t? Surely I made the right decision—but now the others look better? What can it mean, when fundamental life choices change out from under you? This provokes confusion, resentment, and uncertainty. Anti-rational religious claims were a relatively effective treatment. You could take pride in doing what was religiously right, at great cost, even though it might seem senseless otherwise.

In fact, over the past few decades, many have shifted away from the early-marriage, large-family strategy. Some have moved in the direction of delay. Conservatives have smaller families than they did—although on average they still have almost one more child than liberals. Many send children to college—despite the discrimination conservatives may face↗︎︎ there. On the other hand, economic trends that started in the 1970s have accelerated, making it ever more difficult to raise a family on a single working-class income. Many have despaired, given up, and slid into strategy 1—which may seem like total failure.

If this strategy analysis of social conservatism is right, its eternalistic↗︎︎ religious rhetoric is a smoke screen. The “family values” agenda is just self-interested: it tries to harm competing social classes and benefit its own. The large-family strategy it promotes is not “more moral”; it is good for some people and bad for others. Forcing it on the underclass—“you can’t have children unless you have a steady job and stay married”—means they will fail, and be eliminated as competition. Forcing it on the upper middle class—“you can’t have sex unless it results in children, and mothers have to stay home to care for them”—eliminates much of their advantage.

Still, this understanding of what they are up to makes me more, not less, sympathetic to social conservatives. They are not just being irrationally hateful. Pursuing self-interest, and moralizing it to conceal selfish motivations even from oneself, is universal. It can’t be condemned.

Also, from this perspective, one can see sexual liberalism as mainly self-interested politicking for strategy 3. Getting to sleep around, while waiting to have children until you’ve gotten your professional degree and established your career, makes your twenties tolerable.

The core of the monist counterculture was college-educated, middle class people in their twenties. Some went back to the “straight world” in their thirties, pursuing the delayed strategy. Some “dropped out” permanently and defaulted to the opportunistic strategy. You can view their contempt for “traditional marriage” as merely a self-interested attempt to harm those pursuing strategy 2.

Indeed, while sexual freedom is functional for some people, the change in social attitudes since the ’60s has been devastating for others. I find plausible arguments made by Charles Murray, in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010↗︎︎, and Theodore Dalrymple, in Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass↗︎︎. The loosening of social norms, particularly around sex, drugs, and family, which originated in the monist counterculture and which is propagated by the leftish upper middle class, has been catastrophic for the working class. Millions who might have led decent early-marriage strategy-2 lives have slipped instead into the underclass: destructive drug addiction, permanent unemployment, crime, child neglect and abuse.13

Dualist community

The monist counterculture’s Romantic fantasy of community was the rural commune. One reason those failed was that most hippies were from middle-class urban backgrounds, and had no clue how to start a balky tractor, snake a drain, or slaughter a hog. The core of the dualist counterculture came from the rural working class, for whom such things are everyday tasks. If only they had been able to cooperate!

In fact, “Jesus freaks↗︎︎”—Charismatic Christian hippies—formed some of the most successful communes. Their Jesus Movement↗︎︎, which predated the main dualist counterculture, was an important bridge between the two, working out ways hippie innovations could be adapted for use by Christian conservatives.14

The dualist counterculture appealed particularly to people from rural backgrounds who experienced culture shock when they moved to cities and office-park suburbs for work. The main dualist fantasy of community was an idealization of “traditional” small-town life—“traditional” meaning “all the good stuff with none of the bad.” Despite much talk, the counterculture had no credible program for fixing rampant rural social pathology, so this was no more realistic than the hippie commune movement.

Churches were centers of the dualist counterculture. Church community can provide substantial material support, in addition to the memetic and social support I mentioned earlier. However, existing church institutions were inadequate. The counterculture innovated extensively in sermons and service style, music, management structure, marketing, architecture, and social ministries.

The most successful new-model churches grew explosively into megachurches↗︎︎, a qualitatively new form of social organization. Like the few successful communes, these became subsocieties: local communities with a distinctive subculture that served a wide array of social needs. This was far more functional in practice than “traditional small-town life.” Hoping to reform small towns nationally was a characteristically countercultural project; megachurches are a subcultural one. Therefore, I will discuss them in detail in the next chapter, rather than here.

Upshot and aftermath

In the end, neither counterculture had a workable program for reforming the self, or society, or for renegotiating their relationship.

Although the proposals of both countercultures were extreme, neither was sufficiently radical. Both left intact a structure of individuals and a nation-scale society confronting each other across an unbridgeable gap. Both merely fiddled with details on either side of the chasm, rather than proposing a fundamentally different approach to the problems of individualism and collectivism. This is a major reason the countercultures failed.

Their social proposals were simplistic and utopian. Social liberalism is not right. It is good only for some people. Social conservatism is also not right; just good for some people. The fact is, different sorts of people need different social arrangements, including different sexual, family, and community norms.

Later I will argue that this was the fundamental error of the countercultures: universalism. Both tried to impose their preferred way of life on everyone else. However, neither way was accepted by a majority, let alone everyone.

This failure brought out totalitarian tendencies in both countercultures—particularly the dualist one. Totalitarianism, too, makes the personal political and seeks to destroy the boundary between a social system and individuals. It would take extreme state repression to force everyone into a uniform code of sexual morality. Imposing an early-marriage large-family strategy is, indeed, a central project of Islamism, a totalitarian dualist counterculture.15 Fortunately, in America, both countercultures grudgingly accepted their democratic failure, with only minor terrorist violence from extremists on each side.

Although neither counterculture’s political program was adopted in full, both partially succeeded in transforming American government, law, and social norms. (More about that in “Rotating politics ninety degrees clockwise.”) Both caused considerable harm to society and to individuals, but also had some benefits.

Making explicit that the self/society boundary needed softening and reworking was a helpful step toward the subcultural mode. The conflict between the countercultures made clearer what the problems of self and society are. It made some people aware that social systems are contingent constructions, not absolute truths, so we all have a responsibility to help them evolve. Although both countercultures were eternalist↗︎︎, most people found themselves somewhere in the middle, which made eternalism, monism, and dualism less credible. That too set us up for the subcultural mode’s move away from all three of those confused stances↗︎︎.

Subculturalism developed structurally new models of the self, of society, and their relationship:

  • Acknowledging the fragmentation of the self as inevitable made it increasingly unproblematic.
  • Acknowledging diversity (including diversity of moral views) allows like-minded people to form distinctive subsocieties. This provided a layer of organization intermediate between the family and the nation-state.
  • Thus, the extreme ideals of existentialist individualism (the one-pointed self perfectly separated from social influence) and totalitarian collectivism (the boundaryless self entirely dissolved in social conformity) both lost their appeal.
  • 1. There were exceptions, particularly in the monist counterculture. Monist movements like anti-capitalism, anti-rationalism, eco-primitivism, the Noble Savage mythos, and the back-to-the-land movement would have destroyed systematicity altogether if actually carried out. The dualist counterculture’s alliance with the big-business Republican right mainly forestalled similar moves, although its fringier anti-rational elements could have been equally catastrophic if they had gained power.
  • 2. One manifestation: Christian Voice, the second-most-important Christian Right organization, issued influential “Morality Ratings” on every member of Congress, based on their support or opposition to its legislative agenda.
  • 3. Although the New Left was officially Marxist and anti-capitalist, it had no substantive economic program. Its supposed anti-capitalism was mainly actually opposition to the emotionally unfulfilling “iron cage↗︎︎” of employment in big-business bureaucracy; to the responsibility of private industry for environmental destruction; to the military-industrial complex’s promotion of unnecessary wars for profit; and to the inadequacy of government anti-poverty programs. The counterculture was not seriously opposed to a market economy, and was mainly enthusiastic about consuming its bounty of nifty new goods.
  • 4. From the Victorian era forward, do-gooders had campaigned against masturbation and prostitution. Though these campaigns were public, their objects were private, and therefore considered matters of “morality,” not “politics.”
  • 5. Communal agrarian self-sufficiency is a persistent, malign Romantic fantasy. Brook Farm↗︎︎ was a hippie commune of the 1840s which failed in just the same way as the ones of the 1960s. The Utopia Experiment↗︎︎ describes another attempt ten years ago, which followed the same script again. (This one led by an academic expert on, among other things, the existential risk posed by runaway artificial intelligence.) The underlying fantasy is that the choiceless mode would be paradise. The reality is that it is awful in material terms, even when its human relationships feel more natural.
  • 6. I put “conservative” and “traditional” in quotes for this reason.
  • 7. This model was inspired by sociological research by Jason Weeden and his collaborators. See, for instance, “Religious attendance as reproductive support↗︎︎,” “Sociosexuality vs. fast/slow life history↗︎︎,” and “Churchgoers are restricted individuals in fast groups↗︎︎.” My discussion here is not an accurate summary of Weeden’s views, and he might disagree with it. However, if it includes any useful insights, they are mostly his.
  • 8. These are not the only possible strategies. For example, extended families sharing a single home were mainly extinct in America by the middle of the twentieth century. Polygamy had been banned a century earlier. Both are common elsewhere, and more traditional than the “traditional marriage” promoted by “conservatives.” DINK—dual income, no kids—is an increasingly popular non-reproductive strategy.
  • 9. I could give similar analyses for the other “family values” issues—drugs, pornography, prostitution, feminism, homosexuality, divorce, and so forth. However, I’m not trying to give a detailed account of social conservatism here, just a sketch of a possible explanation of its principle and function.
  • 10. As with any major movement, different people oppose abortion for different reasons. Some have genuine sympathy for fetuses, or genuinely believe that the Bible forbids abortion. However, these moral and religious concerns can’t explain why most Protestants thought abortion was fine until the mid-’70s, before suddenly making it their central political issue. Many abortion opponents do explicitly connect it with “welfare queens,” “sluts,” and “selfish career women,” consistent with a class-based reproductive-strategy analysis. It’s worth noting also that opposition to abortion partly replaced opposition to contraception, which was only made fully legal in America in 1972, by the Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird↗︎︎.
  • 11. Plausibly one reason such professions underpay their entry-level positions is to screen out anyone who would prefer strategy 2 to 3—the lower-middle-class riffraff we don’t want in our office.
  • 12. Of course, it has never been entirely restricted to those classes. In fact, one impetus to the 1980s dualist counterculture was the upward mobility of fundamentalists, from the rural working class to the suburban technical middle-middle class, particularly in the Sunbelt defense industry.
  • 13. Of course, economic changes that have disadvantaged the working class are also major factors.
  • 14. See Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right↗︎︎, pp. 101, 131-4, et passim.
  • 15. Islamism was founded by Sayyid Qutb, after spending two years in America, 1949-51. His horror at American sexual openness↗︎︎ seems to have been a major inspiration for the movement. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.”

What they don’t teach you at STEM school

What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School (book cover)

What they do teach you at STEM school is how to think and act within rational systems. What they mostly don’t teach you is how to evaluate, choose, combine, modify, discover, or create systems. Those skills are actually more important for social, cultural, and personal progress. Learning them is also rarer, and more difficult—currently!

This post sketches a hypothetical curriculum for developing these meta-systematic capabilities. It’s preliminary; perhaps even premature. There is no existing presentation of this subject that I know of, which makes it more difficult than it should be. My understanding of the topic draws on a dozen academic disciplines, each written in its own unnecessarily obscure code. Both my understanding, and the pedagogical structure I’m proposing, are tentative and incomplete.

Partly this presentation hopes to inspire some readers to pursue meta-systematicity; partly it is a plan for a large project that I hope to pursue myself; partly I hope you will give feedback, make suggestions, or contribute ideas to the project too!

Goal and audience

The overall goal is to take you from systematic rationality to meta-rationality as quickly and painlessly as possible. The curriculum should re-present insights I’ve found in many semi-relevant fields, as clearly and simply as possible, in STEM-friendly terms, in a structured, sequential format.

Learning meta-systematic skills shouldn’t be so hard, and meta-systematic understanding is particularly valuable in STEM. It is inherently somewhat conceptually difficult; but probably not as difficult as, say, senior-year undergraduate physics. However, it does have cognitive prerequisites.

This curriculum is for people who have mastered systematic rationality, specifically in a STEM framework. For the most part, you have to have a thorough understanding of how to work within systems before it’s feasible to step up and out of them, to manipulate them from above. There are other routes to mastering systematic rationality—through experience as a manager in a bureaucratic organization, for instance—but this curriculum will assume a STEM background.

The minimum requirement might be an undergraduate STEM degree; but research experience at the graduate level may be needed. You have to have seen how many different systems work, and—more importantly—how they fail. At the undergraduate level, you are mainly shielded from the failures, and systems get presented as though they were Absolute Truth. Or, at least, they are taught as though Absolute Truth lurks somewhere in the vicinity, obscured only by complex details. Recognizing that there is no Absolute Truth anywhere is a small downpayment on the price of entry to meta-systematicity.

That may already have set off warning bells. Woomeisters and postmodernists say things like that—and if you think they are horribly wrong, I agree!

This curriculum is about how to do STEM better. It is not about taking you out of a STEM worldview into some alternative. Everything here is on top of that view. It addresses limitations in the way STEM is typically taught and practiced, but does not contradict any of its content. There is no woo involved—including no STEM-flavored woo, such as neurobabble or quantum or Gödel woo.

In fact, a critical step is letting go of some of STEM’s own woo—quasi-religious beliefs about the ability of rationality to deliver certainty, understanding, and control. For that letting-go, the meta-systematic mode demands that one develop an additional cognitive style. Routine STEM is easy for those who are precise and rigid of mind, and so find promises of certainty, understanding, and control particularly comforting. Meta-systematicity requires openness, flexibility, daring, and uncommonly realistic common sense—as well as technical precision.

I’ll begin with some preliminary definitions, and provide a brief overview of the curriculum. Then most of the page goes through the syllabus, organized into ten modules, in more detail. That is still just a summary, which may be difficult to make sense of on its own. I’ve included in it links to resources that provide more explanation; some of my own web pages, and articles and books by others. At this stage in the project, even these leave many holes, which I hope to fill gradually. Many of the books are seriously difficult reading; the hypothetical curriculum would extract and explain clearly their relevant points.

Some loose definitions

By system, I mean, roughly, a collection of related concepts and rules that can be printed in a book of less than 10kg and followed consciously. A rational system is one that is “good” in some way. There are many different conceptions of what makes a system rational. Logical consistency is one; decision-theoretic criteria can form another. The details don’t matter here, because we are going to take rationality for granted.

Meta-systematic cognition is reasoning about, and acting on, systems from outside them, without using a system to do so. (Reasoning about systems using another system is systematic, and meta, but not “meta-systematic” in this sense.1) Meta-rationality, then, is “good” meta-systematic cognition. Mostly I use the terms interchangeably.

One field I draw on is the empirical psychology of adult development↗︎︎, as investigated by Robert Kegan particularly. This framework describes systematic rationality as stage 4↗︎︎ in the developmental path. Stage 5↗︎︎ is meta-systematic. However, as far as I know, no one from this discipline has applied the stage theory to STEM competence specifically. Empirical study of cognitive development in graduate-level STEM students would be helpful,2 but in the absence of that I’m working from a combination of first principles, bits of theory taken from many apparently-unrelated disciplines, anecdata, and personal experience.

According to this framework, there is also a stage 4.5, in which you lose the quasi-religious belief in systems, but haven’t yet developed the meta-systematic understanding that can replace blind faith. Stage 4.5 leaves you vulnerable to nihilism↗︎︎, including ontological despair (nothing seems true), epistemological anxiety (nothing seems knowable), and existential depression (nothing seems meaningful). It’s common to get stuck at 4.5, which is awful.

The arc of the path

Overall, the curriculum leads from 4 to 5, while aiming to avoid the nihilism of 4.5; or at least to minimize its trauma, by leading you forward from 4.5 to 5.

The term “4.5” prompts the thought that the path could be structured as ten substages; 4.1, 4.2, and so on, past 4.5 to 4.6 and eventually on to 5.0. This is a severe “abuse of notation↗︎︎”; the empirical data do not support it. However, it may appeal to STEM folks’ appreciation of crisp structures. So I am provisionally adopting it, taking the spurious definiteness as humorous.

In fact, the key to meta-systematicity is accepting that perfect definiteness is never available. Or, in other words, nebulosity↗︎︎ is pervasive. Meta-systematicity is non-systematic by definition, so it cannot have as cut-and-dried a curriculum as undergraduate physics. The path is necessarily somewhat nebulous. The ten steps are artificial; in reality cognitive development is never altogether linear.

The obstacles to developing meta-systematic skill are emotional as much as cognitive. Everyone must navigate two emotional crises.

When you have watched rational systems fail enough times, you are ready to move beyond stage 4. However, you may also start to sense the nihilism that lies ahead. You recoil in horror from the possibility that all systems may fail conclusively. Then you may cling even more tightly to the safety of the known, and try harder to persuade yourself that the eternalistic lies and rationalist myths are true. This may make it difficult to take even the first steps beyond stage 4.

It should be helpful to make explicit from the beginning that falling into nihilism at stage 4.5 is a possibility, but that it is avoidable if you are suitably equipped. Also, that beyond 4.5 is stage 5, which is more functional than stage 4 (whereas 4.5 can render you practically catatonic if you don’t know how to deal with it).

The second potential emotional crisis comes at 4.5, when you fully understand that systems can’t function in their own terms, but don’t yet have a clear understanding of why they do work. Three supports may help:

  • Testimony that such understanding is possible
  • Gaining some conceptual understanding and experience of meta-systematicity ahead of time
  • A clear explanation of why nihilism is factually and conceptually mistaken

So:

  • Modules 4.1 and 4.2 introduce meta-systematic cognition, to give some confidence that it’s distinctive and valuable, and that you can do it.
  • Modules 4.3 and 4.4 show how stage 4’s eternalistic understanding of systems is mistaken.
  • Module 4.5 explains why nihilism is also wrong.
  • Modules 4.6-5.0 explain how systems actually do work, and teach meta-systematic cognitive skills.

In 4.3 and 4.4, we challenge the systematic worldview’s understanding of how systems themselves work. We demonstrate that the certainty, understanding, and control promised by 4 is false; but also begin to show that a different kind of knowledge is possible through meta-systematicity, and meta-systematic skills give you more confidence, understanding, and influence than are genuinely possible at 4.

By the end of 4.4, you need to have abandoned the hope that systems can ever be made to “work” in the way stage 4 assumes. You have to really, truly, permanently give up on that to go further. But then the 4.5 module explains in detail why nihilism is wrong. Systems obviously do work—just not in the way claimed. If you assimilate both the 4.4 and 4.5 material, you recognize that nebulosity and pattern↗︎︎ are inseparable, and so there must be some alternative to both eternalism and nihilism. And, from 4.1 and 4.2, you have some vague sense of what that must be.

Module 4.6 introduces the complete stance↗︎︎ that acknowledges both nebulosity and pattern. The subsequent modules take that as given, and develop cognitive skills that work with their interplay. 4.7 explains how systems actually work (namely, by non-systematic situated meaning-making) at the nuts-and-bolts level. 4.8 and 4.9 develop skillful meta-systematic cognitive patterns, at increasing levels of complexity and breadth.

5.0 could point out that, according to developmental psychologists, all aspects of the person typically progress more-or-less in sync. This curriculum concentrates only on cognition, because that’s what a STEM audience most wants to hear about. Having made the 4-to-5 shift cognitively, it should be easier to understand and appreciate the parallel changes that are possible in emotional life, relationships, culture, and society.

The syllabus in more detail

Jedi master marmot teaches mad skills

4.1 Meta-rationality is a thing and you already do it

Modules 4.1 and 4.2 aim to inspire you to step beyond stage 4, with promises of mad cognitive skills of types you haven’t learned before, and which are useful in STEM practice. To the extent possible at this stage, they should deliver on the promise, actually teaching meta-systematic skills that you will find valuable even if you go no further.

4.1 is an introduction. It gives simple examples of meta-systematic cognition, with exercises that leave you confident that:

  • There is such a thing
  • You can do it, and in fact already had been doing it
  • It’s not something you’ve been taught much about before
  • It’s useful and you want to learn more.

A first lesson in meta-rationality” and “Judging whether a system applies” fit nicely in this 4.1 category.

4.2 Developing meta-rational skills

Here we go through all the various meta-systematic operations—evaluating, choosing, combining, modifying, discovering, and creating systems—in “sandboxes” that give simple illustrations for each. The Bongard problems of the “first lesson” are a sandbox for system discovery, for example.

Then we’ll look at some more serious, real-world examples, to give confidence that meta-systematicity is valuable for more than solving artificial puzzles.

How To Think Real Good” includes some 4.2-level material. I wrote it before I was thinking in the sequential framework I’m suggesting here, so it’s pretty scattershot, with bits that might fit into several modules.

4.1 and 4.2 leave intact the stage 4 understanding of what systems are and how they work. At this point, the aim is to “create space” around systems: to challenge the implicit assumption that operating within them is the whole story, and to show how acting on systems from the territory outside is also possible.

4.3 Nebulosity and the limits of systems

Here we begin to break up the systematic worldview’s fundamental assumptions. There’s several quite different ways of going at this, and 4.3 and 4.4 should lead the student through several; one may lead to understanding where others don’t.

Here’s one, in abstract summary. Any system describes the world in terms of a vocabulary of entities, categories, properties, and relationships. According to the systematic worldview, the system works because terms of the vocabulary correspond to entities, categories, properties, and relationships that actually exist in the world, and which work the way the system says they do.

However, the human-scale world doesn’t have any entities, categories, properties, or relationships. Not objectively, anyway! The physical world is nebulous—cloud-like—without any definite boundaries. There are no objectively-separable entities, because everything is somewhat mushy around the edges. Even after you divide the world up into entities by fiat, they never quite fit into categories. Your taxonomy always has some vagueness, making for marginal cases that can’t be classified meaningfully. Similarly, your imputed entities never definitely have the properties you enumerated. (Where does “red” end and “orange” begin? How much speckling can an apple have before you no longer want to call it “red”?) And so also with relationships.

Brian Smith’s On the Origin of Objects↗︎︎ discusses this in detail.

“No amount of evidence can fix a wrong theory” is the title of what will probably be my next metablog post. It illustrates the failure of rational systems with two case studies, epicycles and nutrition, and fits neatly in module 4.3. It also introduces the basic ideas of chaotic dynamics↗︎︎, which are another common reason for rational systems not “working” in their own terms.

4.4 Systems can never “work”

This module continues the theme of 4.3, using numerous examples and forms of rational reasoning to undermine the cognitive illusions and emotional appeal of systematic eternalism: its promises that complete certainty, understanding, and control are possible, at least in principle.

Here we need to address objections that systems can be grounded in fundamental physics or mathematics, so they can (ultimately, at least) be made reliable. These are straightforward logical errors, which can be rectified with straightforward rational arguments. (A section of the “first lesson” dispelled one such objection rooted in the Church-Turing Thesis.)

Despite the module’s title, it’s not that rational systems don’t work; much of the time, they obviously do, and are indispensable. It’s that systems don’t work for the reasons ideological rationality claims they do. They do work for quite different ones (which we’ll learn in 4.7-4.9). This matters because rationality’s failure modes are not the ones rationalists expect.

Rationality expects failures due to known unknowns: parameter uncertainty, incomplete information of determinate types, and insufficient computational power, for instance. These sorts of failures can be planned for, and mitigated by adjustments within the system.

Systems don’t expect, and can’t cope with, unknown unknowns.3 For example: relevant common-sense observations can’t be made to fit into the model because its vocabulary doesn’t make the necessary distinctions; a sensible rule is misinterpreted in a specific case; significant aspects of the circumstances are unexpectedly not accounted for by the model at all, so it’s not even wrong, but entirely inapplicable; the system’s recommended course of action is infeasible, ignored, or obstructed, and the next-best option is outside its scope.

These sorts of failures are the raw materials that the meta-systematic skills of 4.7-4.9 work with! But for a stage 4 sensibility, they either have to be denied and ignored, or else they result in total breakdown.

Rittel and Webber’s “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning↗︎︎” discusses “wicked problems,” which cannot be solved systematically. In fact, “wicked” problems can’t be solved at all. But they are important, and can be addressed intelligently by other means. Most problems that involve more than a few people are “wicked” in this sense—which may explain why STEM-educated people tend not to like those sorts of problems!

Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason↗︎︎ is a rather dated discussion of artificial intelligence. However, it is actually a first-principles, rational argument against the sufficiency of systematic rationality per se, and applies to people as much as to computers.4 I believe the argument is basically correct. Dreyfus’s conceptual framework is based in Heidegger’s Being and Time↗︎︎, which I’ll mention again later.

James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed↗︎︎ describes ways that rational systems cause catastrophes when they collide with nebulosity. It’s recommended highly↗︎︎ by many smart people, but I haven’t managed to read it yet.

4.5 Cloud-treading over the nihilist abyss

The eternalistic myth of systems is that they provide definite ground: solid justifications for understanding, and guarantees of effectiveness for action. By implication, without a correct system, knowledge is impossible and action is futile.

Module 4.4 showed that there is no solid place to stand anywhere. Knowledge, understanding, and action can only ever be vague, ambiguous, and fluid. That is: nebulous; cloud-like.

This may—perhaps should!—induce severe vertigo. The aim is to bring the student to a total emotional, as well as intellectual, disillusionment with rationalist eternalism. You realize you are over the abyss of meaninglessness, with nothing but wisps of cloud between you and the bottomless darkness beneath. This can produce panic, rage, and depression: symptoms of the nihilism of stage 4.5.

I believe those can be prevented; but some degree of emotional upset may be unavoidable. Moving conclusively beyond systematicity inevitably induces feelings of loss—loss of your previous way of making sense of the world, and of your previous, systematic self.

Curriculum module 4.5 addresses the danger of stage 4.5 nihilism.

Since there never was any ground, you always were walking on clouds—and that worked pretty well! Your eternalistic belief in systems was mistaken, but your activity was relatively effective nonetheless.

In other words: because we do understand and act effectively, therefore we can. The remaining work, from 4.6 to 5.0, is learning more about how that can be, and how to do it better.

Ideally, pointing this out is sufficient. Nihilism is just obviously wrong, and refuted by every moment of everyday experience. However, there are dozens of supposedly rational arguments in favor of nihilism, which may suddenly seem compelling when you reach stage 4.5—particularly if you come from a STEM background. Each of these arguments is straightforwardly mistaken, on straightforward factual, rational grounds, but there are so many of them that they can oppress you into despair.

Oddly, no one in any intellectual tradition seems to have written a clear and accurate explanation of why nihilism is wrong. Most explicit opposition comes from eternalism, and boils down to “God exists, so nihilism is wrong” and/or “nihilism implies murder is OK, so even considering it is taboo.” More sophisticated writers take it for granted that nihilism is obviously wrong, and so don’t bother to refute it.

I think a detailed refutation of nihilism will be valuable anyway, for two reasons. Falling into nihilism is a genuine danger (especially for STEM folks); and fear that nihilism might be right is one of the main reasons people stick to eternalism even when it is also obviously wrong. So this is near the front of my writing To Do list.

Nietzsche began working on a refutation of nihilism near the end of his working life. His Twilight of the Idols↗︎︎ is a preface to that project. I consider it perhaps the high point of Western philosophy. The single-page chapter “How the “True World” finally became a fable↗︎︎” is an intense summary of his summary—and also of the whole Western philosophical tradition and what is wrong with it.5 As for the overcoming of nihilism, he writes there:

Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.

Robert Kegan’s work↗︎︎ can be read as a guide to the transitions from eternalism, to nihilism, to the complete stance. He wrote primarily about the emotional and relational aspects, although he does describe the epistemological ones in passing. My work here could be taken as filling in the details he omitted.

4.6 The dance of nebulosity and pattern

Systems, we saw in 4.3, don’t deal well with nebulosity, so they try to avoid it↗︎︎, ignore it, pretend it doesn’t exist, hope it goes away, or destroy it. Going beyond systematicity requires acknowledging nebulosity. Nebulosity by itself would be unworkable, but it always intertwines with patterns, and effective meta-systematicity works with their inseparable union.

My understanding here draws heavily on Dzogchen↗︎︎, a branch of Buddhism. The most relevant work I know of is Ju Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty↗︎︎, which unfortunately is extremely difficult. The content is only moderately difficult, but the presentation assumes familiarity with the technical vocabulary of academic Buddhist philosophy and its two thousand years of arcane controversies. In a sense, Meaningness could be read as an attempt to make the Beacon of Certainty accessible.

Taoism, which I know much less well, also developed a sophisticated understanding of nebulosity and pattern. The Zhuangzi↗︎︎ is the root text. It is easy to read (unlike Mipham), but I found it difficult to understand. The mathematician Raymond Smullyan developed an interpretation↗︎︎ that may appeal particularly to STEM folks.

From Taoism, I’ve found most valuable The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting↗︎︎. It is notionally about Chinese landscape painting, but actually about nebulosity and pattern. I wrote about it here.

In the Western tradition, ideas about “spontaneous order↗︎︎” and “emergent behavior↗︎︎” are relevant. The most sophisticated treatments are in economics and in evolutionary theory. These two are closely linked, with each influencing the other throughout their history. Norman Barry’s The Tradition of Spontaneous Order↗︎︎ is a useful historical review of the economic strand.

4.7 Orienting to a rule: the occasion of use

Where 4.6 is abstract, general, and may sound vaguely mystical,6 4.7 gets down to nuts and bolts.

So how do rational systems work, if they don’t mirror the True World? Module 4.7 answers: through non-systematic situated meaning-making. Put another way: by intelligent interpretation of the system as meaningful in specific but necessarily nebulous circumstances. Or: through the participants in an interaction orienting to a rule as a resource on that particular occasion. These answers are still highly abstract, but the module will show how it is possible to understand them, and to demonstrate their accuracy empirically, in extreme specificity and detail.

Heidegger’s Being and Time↗︎︎ is the root text for non-systematic situated meaning-making. That book is extremely difficult, so I would recommend instead Hubert Dreyfus’s Being-in-the-World↗︎︎, a readable explanation of the relevant parts of Heidegger’s work. It is still relatively abstract.

The nuts-and-bolts understanding comes from ethnomethodology, which investigates the question “how do systems actually work” through minutely detailed observation and analysis of actual people actually using systems. This immediately eviscerates the rationalist view, and demonstrates the correct alternative fairly painlessly.

Empiricism for the win! Isn’t it obvious this is the right approach? And yet ethnomethodology remains almost entirely unknown outside a handful of academic departments.7 Part of the problem is the lack of an accessible introduction. I started with John Heritage’s Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology↗︎︎, which is excellent but not easy. (Garfinkel founded the field; his own writing is nearly impenetrable.)

Mainly ethnomethodology is difficult because it requires a new way of seeing. Many people report experiencing a sudden flip in perception when they “get” it. In order to “get it,” you have to set aside everything you think you know—in order to actually look, without mistaken assumptions. Otherwise, you hallucinate systems where there are none. Theoretical presuppositions get in the way of accurate observation.

The Anglophone rationalist tradition (analytic philosophy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence) assumes that systems live in your head. They don’t. Representations are not datastructures. Rules are not effective procedures. Plans do not engender action. Until you set those delusions aside, when you look at people acting, you keep asking “what rule in their head made them do that?”, which prevents you from seeing what is going on.

The Continental social tradition assumes that systems are vast, abstract structures of oppression, with elite-imposed power rules, which determine the details of individual interactions. This is backward. Ethnomethodology reveals social systems as extremely concrete, detailed patterns of interaction. Large-scale social structures are determined by these details, not the other way around. Constantly asking “how does this exemplify oppression?” prevents you from seeing what is going on.

So, what is going on? Rules work through their interpretation by the participants in a concrete situation. That interpretation bridges the gap between the system’s theoretical vocabulary and the nebulosity of the visible specifics. Such interpretation is inherently, necessarily improvisational and collaborative. In ethnomethodological terms, participants orient to rules. They take rules as a resource for making sense of what everyone involved is doing, but the rules don’t govern the action in any way. Rules are routinely violated; and then there are patterns of reaction and repair.

My brief paper “Computer Rules, Conversational Rules↗︎︎” may help explain this. It tries to join the ethnomethodological and cognitivist understandings, and explains ethnomethodological conversation analysis by analogy to computer networking protocols.

An orrery: Carlo G. Croce's reconstruction of Dondi's Astrarium

Taking different examples as prototypes leads to the “vision flip.” For the Enlightenment tradition, Newton’s theory of gravity is the universal prototype. To caricature only slightly, ideological rationalism imagines you have an orrery in your head computing F = GmM/r2, and it’s connected to your muscles and makes you do things. Newtonian mechanics is incredibly cool, but most things don’t work that way. For the Continental social tradition, the enclosure movement↗︎︎ is the universal prototype. To caricature only slightly, social theory imagines that reality consists of a series of ever-more-monstrous enclosures. Enclosure was a big deal if you lived in Scotland in 1800, but most things don’t work that way.

We are eating breakfast. You say “Jam?” and I nod in a particular way, and you pass it to me. If I had nodded in a slightly different way, you would not have passed it. There are rules about nods, which are part of a larger system of conversational rules. You may not “know” the rules about nods, but you reliably orient to them, and interpret them accurately.8 As ethnomethodologists, we can find the rules by video recording people eating breakfast, and watching carefully, over and over.

This is a different prototype. Nods may seem trivial, but—I will argue—systems mostly do work that way.9

4.8 Patterns of meta-systematicity

Modules 4.8 and 4.9 teach meta-systematic skills, at a much more sophisticated level than 4.2. We’re no longer pretending, as we did there, that systems work systematically. Instead, we are taking into account the nebulosity of all systems, the nebulosity of the situations in which we use them, and the nebulosity of the system/situation interaction.

4.8 and 4.9 may be the most important part of the curriculum. Unfortunately, it is the part that is least-well understood: by me and, I think, by everyone. Still, there is already much to say; and because the topic is not much investigated, there may be much low-hanging fruit left for the picking.

In retrospect, “How To Think Real Good” was an attempt. I wrote it in a hurry, and I understand the issues better now, and it looks remarkably lame three years later! However, it does make the key point that we can only ever deploy rationality as a miscellaneous collection of oft-useful tools, rather than The Single Correct Way To Do Everything.

“How To Think” was case-study driven, and that’s probably the best method of investigation. It draws some general conclusions, but inevitably—given the nebulosity of the topic—those can only be nebulous. Insight comes from close examination of specifics (as in ethnomethodology). Finding and analyzing good case studies may be a significant task.

I have also found relevant insights in diverse not-obviously-relevant literatures (some of which I’ve alluded to in this post). Extracting and explaining these is another project. I’ll mention two works here, briefly:

Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action↗︎︎ examines the interplay of three ways of knowing and acting: technical rationality, non-systematic tacit expertise↗︎︎, and meta-systematic reflection on the first two. The book is based on his close examination of the practice of professionals in five different disciplines, and presents many case studies. He starts from the observation that systematic rationality frequently fails when it meets nebulosity, but he shows how competent professionals can find creative and effective courses of action by drawing on tacit and meta-systematic resources. He observes that problem-finding and problem-formulation are as important as problem-solving, and that all these activities are improvisations in collaborative interaction with concrete, hard-to-characterize circumstances. [Update: Reader Brian Marick↗︎︎ recommends Schön’s follow-on book Educating the Reflective Practitioner↗︎︎ over the original; he says it’s clearer and more concise.]

Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge↗︎︎ is one of the two root texts for postmodernism. Knowing this, you might not suspect that it was commissioned by the government of Quebec as a report on the influence of information technology on the exact sciences. Written in 1979, it’s astonishingly prophetic about the then-future impact of the internet—but that is not the reason to read it. You might also not suspect that, unlike the voluminous obscurantist blather of later postmodernists, it’s only 70 pages and reasonably clearly written. Lyotard’s main topic is the breakdown of the systematic worldview in the face of nebulosity, and the persistence of multiple, functional, partial systems despite that. He aims for “a politics that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown.” This remains unfulfilled, and obstructed not least by the subsequent development of postmodernism—but I think still a worthy goal.

4.9 Fluid competence: Creating functional meta-systems

This module describes systems that recognize nebulosity, and the limitations of their own systematicity, and so are open to continual structural revision as they are illuminated by interaction with nebulous circumstances.

Several of the key figures I mentioned above moved from studying meta-systematic cognition in individuals and task groups to applying their insights to larger social structures. Schön, Kegan, and Brown all pioneered theories of “learning organizations” that continually rethink not just their methods but also their goals.10 They ask not just “how do we solve this technical or business problem” but also “what problems are we addressing? are they still the right ones?” and “what are we doing to support our staff in developing↗︎︎ to address our business more effectively?” Answers to these questions are inevitably improvisational, collaborative, interpretive, and meta-systematic.

I would like to end 4.9 with a section titled “Conjuration: legendary feats of meta-rationality.” I have, actually, many examples in mind; but none of them are in STEM fields. Does this mean meta-systematicity is not, after all, useful in those fields? I don’t think so. Probably, instead, it is because STEM results have to be stated and evaluated in systematic terms. I suspect meta-rational insights produce many STEM breakthroughs, but the resulting journal articles don’t explain the thinking process. (A STEM paper is not supposed to include that.) And so this knowledge—which may be incredibly valuable—is generally lost. The rare discussions by major scientists about how to think—I discussed Feynman’s and Rota’s in “Real Good”—often talk meta-systematically.

5.0 The other dimensions

According to Kegan’s framework, developing a meta-systematic way of being affects every dimension of life. It completely reorganizes your self, your relationship with your self, and your relationships with others. That reorganization manifests in structurally identical ways in your family life, your understanding of ethics, how you plan projects, the way you act at work, and so on.

Kegan says that an epistemological shift—a new way of making meaning—underlies all the rest. He explains the epistemological dimensions of the other stage transitions in detail, but says little about this in 4-to-5 development.11 This hypothetical curriculum would supply that missing discussion.

I suspect—based only on anecdata—that STEM folks can make the 4-to-5 transition more readily than most others, if the epistemological dimension is brought to the fore. We care about epistemology in a way most people don’t; and it is an epistemological shift that drives the development of other dimensions of being.

Completing the hypothetical 4.9 module should bring the hypothetical STEM-educated student to a stage 5 epistemology.

It would then be helpful to explain the rest of the 4-to-5 shift by analogy with that epistemology. That is, a stage 5 marriage is structurally parallel to a stage 5 STEM research project; and so are stage 5 ethics, religion, management, art, and politics.

  • 1. “Meta-systematicity” is non-systematic just by definitional fiat. This is not an empirical claim; rather, I’m declaring any systematic reasoning about systems to be non-meta-systematic for terminological convenience. Otherwise I’d keep having to say “non-systematic meta-systematicity,” which would be tedious. I do make the empirical claim that much reasoning about systems has to be non-systematic, but this is distinct from the definitional fiat.
  • 2. Maybe this has been done by education theorists? They certainly look at high-school level STEM learning. There is also a relevant literature on “post-formal operations,” in the Piagetian framework, but I haven’t yet looked at it seriously.
  • 3. This term was accidentally popularized by Donald Rumsfeld. It had been used by others↗︎︎ for decades before, however.
  • 4. And also as little. That is: humans avoid the critique by being non-systematic much of the time, and there’s no reason in principle to think artificial agents can’t do the same. In the first edition of this book, Dreyfus assumed that computers could only be programmed to operate systematically, which was reasonable given the claims of AI researchers of the time, who were attempting to program systematic rationality. The second edition↗︎︎ adds a discussion of so-called “neural networks,” which supposedly do not attempt systematic rationality.
  • 5. Because it’s highly condensed, it may be incomprehensible without some knowledge of the tradition. One key to understanding is that “Königsbergian” is a reference to Kant specifically. The supposed “true world” of Nietzsche’s stage 3 is Kant’s ding an sich, “the thing in itself.” That is the inaccessible “noumenon↗︎︎,” or true reality, as opposed to the defective “phenomenon” that appears to the senses. This is a catastrophically bad idea, which leads straight to nihilism.
  • 6. Economic theory is not all that mystical, although its relationship with reality is often dubious.
  • 7. John Seely Brown↗︎︎, the genius director of Xerox PARC, recognized its value, and hired several ethnomethodologists. They did some extremely interesting work on how people use information systems, with implications for how those could work better. One of these studies wound up making Xerox a great deal of money. I learned about ethnomethodology from that group when I worked there. I had lost track of JSB for the past 15 years or so; I see he has a new book↗︎︎ that looks relevant to my interests!
  • 8. The rules of grammar are also like this. “Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order↗︎︎: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”
  • 9. The ethnomethodological understanding is similar to Wittgenstein’s in Philosophical Investigations↗︎︎—in his discussion of the “builder’s language game” for instance. The builder says “slab! there!” and his assistant puts one there. This is an armchair thought-experiment, however. Ethnomethodology’s extensive empiricism reveals how language, interpretation, cooperation, and improvisation work in much greater detail.
  • 10. All three of them worked as management consultants. By the way, the title of this post is—obviously—a riff on Mark McCormack’s book, whose cover is the header image for this page. The revised edition↗︎︎ is better. I found it very helpful when I was running a tech startup. What they do teach you at Harvard Business School is mostly financial analysis, which is dead easy for anyone with a math degree. What they don’t teach you are people skills—not always as easy for someone (like myself) with a math degree. Financial analysis is a rational system; people skills are not. Actually, I gather that HBS teaches some “soft skills” nowadays—perhaps partly in response to McCormack’s criticism.
  • 11. Kegan says little about stage 5 epistemology in the works of his that I know, anyway. I’ve read only a fraction of his output. His theory is rooted in Piaget’s, which goes only to stage 4 (“formal operations”). Other researchers have proposed theories of stage 5 “post-formal operations,” which Kegan mentions only in passing. Based on only cursory investigation, my impression is that this work isn’t very good, which may be why Kegan decided to pass over the matter in silence.

Ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable

Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (etching)
Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her (reason), she (fantasy) is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”1

In defense of rationalism

I have changed my mind.

It should go without saying that rationality is better than irrationality. But now I realize this does need to be said, again, loudly, firmly, and convincingly. It needs to be said in a way that reverses some recent social and cultural trends.

In past, I have criticized rationalism, as misunderstanding rationality, vociferously. I would like now to advocate and defend it vociferously—versus an apparently rising tide of opposition from multiple directions.

I haven’t got any great ideas about that. However, this post makes some distinctions that might help. Also, I hope I can at least avoid creating extra trouble for rationalism, by explaining that my own criticism of it aims at deploying rationality more effectively.

The “meta-rational” critique takes for granted that rationality is hugely valuable, and that irrational alternatives are mainly harmful. I hope it will help to clarify the distinction between this critique and others.

I will suggest an unusual threefold categorization of movements that oppose rationalism: ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable. Or, less flippantly, irrational, anti-rational, and meta-rational.

Effective advocacy requires understanding how the opposition thinks, and speaking in terms they can understand.2 Opposition to rationalism is diverse, implying different explanations for different audiences. Early drafts of this post tried to sketch three corresponding approaches to rationalist advocacy. I’ve mostly dropped that, because I’m not sure I have anything novel to say.

I’m explaining the categorization here anyway, because I have several upcoming posts about meta-rationality that will refer to it. I want it to be clear how meta-rationality differs from irrationality and anti-rationality.

And, at the end of the post, I will suggest arguments rationalists can use against meta-rationalist criticism!

Categorizing critiques of rationalism

The obvious way to categorize opposition is in terms of the content, or “beliefs” of the opponent:

  • dualist↗︎︎ religion (Christianity, Islam)
  • monist↗︎︎ spirituality (Romanticism, New Age woo)
  • postmodern hyper-relativism
  • political movements which deny that facts and deliberative procedures are relevant to justice or policy decisions (“tumblr SJW,” “alt-right”)
  • miscellaneous delusions and faddish moral panics

This taxonomy is natural because opponents couch their arguments in terms of content, and so the natural thing is to respond to the content. However, if opponents have irrational reasons for holding their beliefs, rational arguments about facts may not help.

Often, supposed “beliefs” are held as tribal shibboleths rather than as truth-claims. In that case “but it’s not true” is not only irrelevant, it’s taken as an attack on the tribe, rather than as a morally neutral statement about the world.

Effective responses need to take into account the cognitive style of the opponent. Rational arguments, aiming to locate truth in an impersonal reality, may be counterproductive if the opponent’s thinking is communal and relational, locating truth in social belonging.

Cognitive styles could form an alternative categorization of opposition to rationalism. The three stages of adult cognitive development↗︎︎ suggest a coarse first cut:

  • Pre-systematic↗︎︎, irrational opposition has no understanding of rationality. It is tribal, emotive, and (by definition) unprincipled.
  • Systematic↗︎︎, anti-rational opposition has at least partial understanding of rationality, but rejects it in favor of alternative principles. This category includes systematic theology and knowledgeable Romanticism. These two strands go all the way back to the Counter-Enlightenment↗︎︎, and were the anti-rational bases of the two counter-cultures of the 1960s-80s.
  • Meta-systematic↗︎︎, meta-rational opposition claims rationalism over-reaches, and focuses on rationality’s limits. This category includes some Continental philosophy (including some “pomo”), and various American lineages of reflective practice, anti-essentialism, ethnomethodology, and so forth.

For fun, and as a mnemonic, I’ll also call these ignorant, irrelevant, and inscrutable:

  • Irrationalism is ignorant of the value of rationality. We should try to educate irrationalists.
  • Anti-rationalism is irrelevant because it can only repeat geriatric arguments that lost their teeth a century ago. The structure of the argument between rationalism and its systematic opponents is fixed; there are no new challengers. It’s probably not worth bothering with. Perhaps, instead, rationalists should ally with anti-rationalists against irrationalism!3
  • Meta-rationalism is inscrutable because we meta-rationalists have failed to explain our claims in a way anyone can understand.

A more detailed categorization would be better—but this is a start. And anyway, this post’s main aim is to distinguish the meta-rational critique from the other two.

Distinguishing ways of thinking from content

Historically, anti-rational and meta-rational critiques have been somewhat effective, because they are partly right. Consequently, they carry considerable prestige. People who are cognitively equipped to understand rational arguments are also capable of recognizing the force of these critiques, so they still sometimes work. They can deter some people who might otherwise adopt rationalism. They can undercut confidence or even convert committed rationalists. And, they can do great damage even when wielded by irrationalists who don’t understand them.

Irrationalists often dismiss valid rational arguments using phrases taken from anti-rational or meta-rational movements. Anyone can parrot a previously-successful argument. When irrationalists brandish those without comprehension, it doesn’t help to explain the errors and limits of the critiques they’ve borrowed from.

It is easy enough for irrationalists to learn to imitate linguistic style. That reduces sophisticated critiques to buzzphrases, arguments repeated by rote, and grossly simplified conceptual structures. The ignorant may then sound like they understand lines of reasoning that they don’t.4 You may be tempted to address them at the level of that reasoning; but that is useless if they can’t follow systematic arguments. By definition, irrationalists can’t understand why they are wrong.

For effective persuasion, it’s important to address the interlocutor’s type of reasoning, more than the argument itself. Reasoning becomes apparent only when an argument is probed. Does the response advert to tribal defense, virtuous feelings, and “beliefs” no one actually holds? (Then their irrationalism is ignorant.) Or to chains of justification rooted in abstract, ultimate principles? (Then their anti-rationalism is irrelevant.) Or to system-boundary nebulosity? (Then their meta-rationalism is inscrutable.)

The American “right” mimics the language of systematic theology, and selectively invokes a handful of religious concepts; but few American Christians know the basic tenets of their faith. If someone rants against homosexuality and invokes “Biblical principles” but can’t explain their own sect’s take on the relationship between justification and sanctification↗︎︎, they are irrational, not anti-rational. The real basis of their opposition is tribal, emotional, and self-interested, not religious.

It was only when I learned to set aside the pious “divine law” nonsense mouthed by social conservatives that I came to understand the underlying, genuine basis of their seemingly-irrational “moral” concerns—and to sympathize with them.

American Millennial “leftists” ape the jargon of poststructuralism, which even their professors mostly can’t understand. At its best, poststructuralism was a meta-rational movement. Most current advocates misunderstand it as showing that claims to authoritative knowledge, by science and rationality, are nothing more than propaganda on behalf of oppressors. If someone rants against capitalism and invokes Foucault, but can’t explain how his archaeological method relates to Saussurean structuralism and existential phenomenology, they are irrational, not meta-rational. The real basis of their opposition is tribal, emotional, and self-interested, not poststructuralist.

It was only when I learned to set aside the pious “structural oppression” nonsense mouthed by campus activists that I came to understand the underlying, genuine basis of their seemingly-irrational “moral” concerns—and to sympathize with them.

Put up or shut up

Meta-rationality shouldn’t be inscrutable.

Meta-rationalists have been promising a coherent account of meaning for nearly a century. Somehow, we’ve never delivered, although we think we understand it quite well. It’s time we put up or shut up.

This is now my Quest: to make meta-rationality accessible.5

Why has no one done this before? Three reasons, maybe:

  • The transition from rationality to meta-rationality involves an irreversible cognitive flip, after which it seems too obvious to explain.
  • Rationalists are afflicted with a frustrating Dunning-Kruger↗︎︎ illusion: they cannot understand that there is something they cannot understand.
  • Meta-rationalists are prone to elitist in-group superiority-signaling.

The cognitive flip

Obscure image of a Dalmatian

Many recall the transition from rationalism to meta-rationalism as a sudden blinding moment of illumination. It’s like the famous blotchy figure above: once you have seen its meaning, you can never unsee it↗︎︎ again. After you get meta-rationality, you see the world differently. You see meanings rationalism cannot—and you can never go back.

This is probably an illusion of memory. The transition occurs only after years of accumulating bits of insight into the relationship between pattern↗︎︎ and nebulosity↗︎︎, language and reality, math and science, rationality and thought. At some point you have enough pieces of the puzzle that the overall shape falls into place—but even then there’s a lot of work left to fill in the holes.

Still, the shape seems utterly obvious once you’ve got it. You can’t remember quite what it was like to not get it. You can’t help being impatient with people who can’t see it. “Look! Come on, it’s a Dalmatian! Just look, it’s right there!”6

Sarah Perry’s writing process graph

The graph above is by Sarah Perry↗︎︎, from a writing course↗︎︎ she co-taught. “Compression speed,” on the vertical axis, is an informal measure of the rate at which you find new insight. It peaks when a bunch of puzzle-pieces you’ve accumulated fall together into a pattern. This is tremendously exciting, and is the best time to communicate the insight—because your excitement is contagious! Once you’ve fully understood something, there’s nothing new to learn, and writing about it will bore your readers as well as you.

I realized only recently, gradually, as I was attempting to write an overview, that no one ever seems to have bothered to explain meta-rationality clearly. Somehow I had never noticed that!

If it’s obvious, it seems not worth explaining; anyone who doesn’t get it must just be an idiot. Anyway, it’s all perfectly straightforward, so you need hardly any explanation, right?

But having begun to try, I’ve found that an explanation is enormously complex. Reading it will be laborious; writing it, more so. Perhaps that is why meta-rationalists are often unhelpful. We are lazy, as well as arrogant.

Explaining something supposedly well-understood is more like writing a textbook than a blog post, thesis, or journal article. When you write a textbook—I am told—you discover there are many aspects of your field you thought you understood, but, actually, you don’t. Or, rather, you had a good enough understanding to use the concepts, but not good enough to explain them. You have been exploiting patterns that let you skate over conceptual nebulosity—but how does that work? You need to build a rigorous logical reconstruction of the foundations of your field.

That project is fun in a quite different way from explaining new object-level insights as they bubble up. (Well, I hope it’s fun!)

Dunning-Kruger

Rationalists may find it difficult to communicate with irrationalists, to explain to them what they are doing wrong in terms they can understand. It’s frustrating. Irrationalism seems like willful stupidity once you see the better alternative. “Look, this is just dumb! The reasons you give make no sense! Why can’t you just see that the evidence, and basic principles of reasoning, show your beliefs are totally wrong?” It’s hard to know where to start sorting out their confusion. It certainly doesn’t help to make rational arguments to people who can’t understand rationality and don’t respect it.

Just as irrationalists can’t understand the rationalist critique, rationalists can’t understand the meta-rational critique. That is frustrating for meta-rationalists, in just the same way. “Look, this is just dumb! The principles you are invoking are irrelevant here! Why can’t you see that the energetic texture of the situation, and basic methods of meta-systematicity, show you are going at it totally wrong?” It’s hard to know where to start sorting out their confusion. It certainly doesn’t help to make meta-rational arguments to people who can’t understand meta-rationality and don’t respect it.

In both cases, incomprehension is not because people are stupid, but because ways of reasoning haven’t been explained in terms they can yet follow.

However, virtually everyone can understand some simple rational reasoning. And almost everyone with a decent grounding in rationality can also understand some simple meta-rational reasoning. (See “A first lesson in meta-rationality.”) So it should be possible to build a continuous, step-by-step bridge from rationality to meta-rationality, just as the STEM curriculum provides a step-by-step bridge from pre-rational thinking to rationality.

Intellectual change occurs when someone points out a better way—not from explaining why your current paradigm is defective. So I intend to turn from griping about rationalism’s errors to presenting a better alternative. That’s more difficult, but I hope it will be more useful.

Elite signaling

Most advocates of meta-rationality have gone out of their way to anti-explain it. This deliberate obscurantism is mostly sneery in-group elitism. Dense jargon and subtle, poorly-explained concepts are forbidding palisades against club entry. Fighting your way up does demonstrate intelligence and grit, but meta-rational skills are too valuable to allow them be monopolized by intellectual elites. Especially because those elites have mainly been satisfied to entertain themselves with clever in-jokes and displays of content-free virtuosity, instead of creating anything useful.

The bridge to meta-rationality must be supportive and respectful of participants whatever their level of understanding. It must avoid put-downs, hazing, shibboleths, and smug IQ-signaling. This is not particularly easy; it goes against the natural human tendency to create tribal in-groups.

The plainspoken American philosopher John Searle was a friend of Michel Foucault, who had important meta-rational insights. He asked Foucault why his writing was so incomprehensible, given that in person he spoke perfectly clearly. Foucault said that in France, no one would take you seriously as a philosopher if they could understand you, so you had to pad your writing with a lot of nonsensical verbiage.

This was a huge moral failure. If the poststructuralists had written clearly, the world might be quite different now, and for the better. By the 1970s, they had acquired enough personal power, prestige, and position that they could have safely defied, and replaced, French academic conventions.

Their legacy is mainly pernicious: they are mis-taken as underwriting irrational tribalism that has done great damage in universities, and has started to spill out into the real world. Their valid insights are not widely understood, and little-used. And, they are little built-upon: if they had written clearly, we might have had much greater progress in meta-rational epistemology over the past few decades.

Instead, the voluminous, blatantly self-interested and irrational “pomo” blather spouted by their academic heirs discredits meta-rationality in the eyes of sensible people.

Responding to inscrutable critiques

As I mentioned, I’m not sure I have anything useful to say about defending rationalism against irrationalism or anti-rationalism. However, I want to suggest two ways to defend rationalism against meta-rational criticism.

The first points out that that an inscrutable argument is highly likely to be nonsense:

If you have anything valid to say—which we do not concede—you need to explain it in a way more people can understand. You have completely failed to even try to do that! This strongly suggests that you don’t have anything to say, but are just spewing meaningless jargon as part of a career-enhancing academic ritual.

In other words, the subjective prior probability that a “meta-rational” argument has any bite should be very low. (Bayes!)

Of course, one can never be certain, and should always consider the consequences of alternative outcomes. (Decision theory!) So a second response is:

Possibly you are right that rationalism isn’t The Answer, but it’s extraordinarily useful and we can’t do without it. At the moment, it’s more important to defend rationalism against irrational attacks than to point out possible, obscure defects. “Meta-rational” criticism has negative expected utility, due to strengthening irrational forces.

  • 1. The etching, by Francisco Goya, is one from a series, published in 1799. These were “a medium for Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society in which he lived. The criticisms are far-ranging and acidic; he speaks against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes and the decline of rationality.” (Wikipedia.) The line about fantasy and reason is Goya’s full epigraph for the piece: La fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibiles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas. It might, perhaps, be taken as a meta-rational maxim? In any case, I love the idea of a fecund lesbian marriage of the two.
  • 2. Empirical studies suggest that effective political argument—if the goal is to change minds—depends on talking in terms your opponents understand and care about. This is rare because most political argumentation preaches to the converted. The typical aim is to gain status among your own crowd, not genuinely to persuade opponents.
  • 3. For instance, serious Christians are as appalled by pomo nonsense as rationalists are, and for some of the same reasons. Both groups value coherent thought, even if they start from different axioms. Is it worth trying to find common cause? Perhaps movements such as Heterodox Academy↗︎︎ can include that effort.
  • 4. “Bayes! Bayes! Bayes!” is a rationalist equivalent: parroting sacred jargon without having thought through the implications, and sometimes even without understanding the concepts named. Some beginners adopt rationalist language mainly as a tribal membership signal; most grow out of it.
  • 5. That’s my Quest this week, anyway. I wouldn’t want to make an eternalistic↗︎︎ mission↗︎︎ out of it. Anyway, I inevitably get distracted by side-quests. “To sail the Sea of Meaningness, first must you raise the Complete↗︎︎ Ship from the Swamp of Nebulosity↗︎︎!” “Uh, ok, I guess I’ll go and try…” “Do, or Do Not! There is no Try.” [Puts on engineer hat, orders block, tackle, winch and cable from Amazon] Did you know that “Dagobah” is the Chinese name for a Tibetan-style temple? Lucas named the planet that for a reason.
  • 6. It’s facing diagonally away from you, in the right half of the image. Look for its head, sniffing the ground, close to the center.

A slice of The Eggplant

Sliced eggplant

Image courtesy↗︎︎ Mike

I’ve web-published a new Introduction and Part One of In the Cells of the Eggplant. Here’s why you might want to read them—or not—and how to read them if you do.

The Eggplant is—or will be—a book about meta-rationality↗︎︎. “Meta-rationality” means improving technical practice through reflection on the relationship between rational↗︎︎ systems and their surrounds. You may care about meta-rationality if you want to level up your work in science, engineering, or other fields that make use of formal systems.

I began writing The Eggplant almost three years ago, expecting it could be finished in a few months. Since then, circumstances have left me with little time to write, and I’ve finished only the first two out of five Parts of the book. I can’t guess when (or whether) I’ll be able to finish it. So I’ve decided to post those Parts, after minor tidying, which is now complete for the first.

Part One is mostly not about meta-rationality. Neither are Parts Two and Three. These three Parts explain preliminary concepts you need in order to understand meta-rationality, which the book explains in Parts Four and Five. To cover this extensive background material, none of which is original to me, I would rather refer readers to other sources. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find clear, detailed, accessible explanations elsewhere, so I’ve had to write them myself.

Part One is about rationalism↗︎︎: a mistaken and obsolete, but still often taken-for-granted, theory of rationality↗︎︎. Understanding rationalism’s errors is a prerequisite for understanding meta-rationalism↗︎︎, which includes a more accurate explanation of rationality. Unless you recognize that rationalism is wrong, you are unlikely to seriously consider an alternative. More significantly, specific failure modes of rationalism point directly to specifics of the more accurate understanding.

Reasons not to read Part One (or not yet)

The Introduction to the book overall explains what it is about, and why you might want to read it. Its section on “Is The Eggplant for you?” includes some reasons you might not, too!

There also are good reasons not to read Part One specifically, or at least not now.

First, The Eggplant builds a tall conceptual tower, with layers of concepts depending on previous ones. It might be best to read the whole thing at once, so the foundations are solid as you work you way up to higher stories. On the other hand, Part One makes sense by itself, and might be interesting for its own sake, and who knows when the rest will be available?

Second, Part One is about forty thousand words, or the equivalent of about a hundred and thirty printed pages. It’s my intention to publish The Eggplant as a conventional book eventually. Many readers say they’d rather have it that way than on the web. You may want to wait for a paper edition. On the other hand, if that includes the whole thing, it may not happen for years. I could publish Part One as a slim paperback by itself—but do you care enough about “how rationalism is wrong” to want just that? (Let me know in a comment below.) Or, since Part Two is also pretty nearly finished, and about the same length, the two could be bound together as typical-length book. But, although each stands alone reasonably well, they don’t form a coherent whole. Part Three, offering a better understanding of rationality, is built on Parts One and Two separately, and the first three Parts would make a cohesive package together. But Part Three is not ready. Maybe Parts One and Two could be two separate short books? I’m dithering, and would welcome advice.

Third, if you have built an identity around rationalism, there’s a danger that Part One will drop you into post-rationalist nihilism, which can be awful. You can avoid that if you have something beyond rationality to look forward to, and meta-rationality fits the bill. However, that part of the book isn’t written yet, so the antidote is not available.

I’ve delayed making Part One public until now, out of concern for precipitating post-rationalist nihilism. My hope is that it does more good than harm; but I’ve been going back and forth about this for months.

So, this is a serious request: please do not read Part One now if you are a committed rationalist. If you are curious, wait at least until you can read Part Three (which explains how rationality does work), and preferably Part Four (which explains how to do it better).

Start at the beginning

The Eggplant is not a collection of essays (much less a blog). It is a densely structured book, building up a complex system of concepts, most of which will be unfamiliar to most readers. Every chapter depends on earlier ones to make sense. I recommend beginning at the beginning, and reading forward in order. (Use the Navigation box at the end of each chapter to orient. Somehow, some readers miss that feature of the web site.)

In fact, I recommend starting with the introduction to the book overall, which explains its motivations, sets out some central concepts, and provides an overview.

I did a major revision of the Introduction a couple months ago. If you have read the version that was up on the web for a couple years before that, I’d recommend revisiting it. Much of the material is new. Skip over the bits you’ve already read, of course!

Indeed, when reading any book, skipping ahead is sensible when you encounter material you already know. Some readers may find much of Part One familiar. In that case, you might flip through it, read only unexpected bits, and go on to Part Two. (You are less likely to be able to do that with Part Two, or later Parts. Their sources are not commonly known.)

As with a paper book, it may be best to read The Eggplant within a narrow time slot, so that earlier concepts will be fresh in your mind as you need them to understand later ones. However, I plan to tweet links to one or two chapters per week, and to put those into the RSS/email feed on the same schedule.

Foreshadowings as exercises

Part One might, at first, sound like a polemical attack on an ideology or identity: namely, rationalism. That is not the intention, although I do hope it will loosen rationalism’s grip. The aim in carefully disassembling rationalism is not destruction, but understanding its misfunctioning, and clearing space for a better alternative. Part Three will reuse some of the same pieces, in a different configuration.

Most chapters in Part One explain some particular difficulty rationalism faces, and then sketch briefly how a different understanding can address the issue. Those positive alternatives foreshadow the detailed presentation on Part Three.

Since Part Three isn’t ready yet, I suggest taking each of these foreshadowings as an exercise to wrestle with. Can you figure out for yourself how to expand each hint into a detailed understanding of the issue? I’d suggest reflecting on your experience of both everyday life and of technical work, and consider how the vaguely-drawn alternative might explain them.

(This reflection is the work of meta-rationality itself! That is, meta-rationality just is considering how rationality and mere reasonableness↗︎︎ play out in practice, largely by examining specific cases.)

It may help to skip ahead and read “The parable of the pebbles,” which is the only chapter of Part Three that’s on the web so far. It’s a condensed version of the Part’s explanation of merely-reasonable “circumrationality,” which is one main aspect of its explanation of rationality overall.

Part Two

As I publish this metablog post, all but two of the chapters of Part Two are also finished and published on the web. So you can read most of it now if you want.

Part Two’s function in the book is to explain “mere reasonableness” in general—for example, in making breakfast. That is a prerequisite to Part Three’s explanation of circumrationality: the more specific types of merely-reasonable work we do to make formal rationality work. So, while reading Part Two, I’d suggest keeping in mind the questions “How can this sort of work address the problems rationalism ran into? How would it help make technical rationality function well in practice?”

The chapter on reasonable ontology is probably the most important, and it’s one of the two unfinished ones. You may want to wait for it before starting Part Two. On the other hand, it’s near the end of the Part, and it’s likely I’ll get it done soon—before you get that far. (It’s mostly written, but I have to work out some issues in how it interfaces with Part Three.)

The rest of the book, and Meaningness

The Eggplant was my highest priority for writing from late 2017 up until covid hit. Reflecting on mortality made me feel that it’s more important to go back and finish some of the core Meaningness material.

A couple months ago, I wrote, and web-published, about half of the central chapter of Meaningness, which is “The complete stance.” That’s more important than The Eggplant, I think. Consider reading it instead, or first? If you haven’t already.

I also web-published some bits of the purpose chapter—mostly versions from 2007 that I decided are good enough, even if I’d write them a bit differently thirteen years later.

Then I decided that, since Parts One and Two of The Eggplant were nearly ready to go, I might as well polish them up and web-publish them.

My intention now—after finishing the last bits of The Eggplant Part Two—is to finish the complete stance chapter, and then to write some more of the nihilism and purpose chapters. I’ll concentrate on explaining the antidotes to the confused↗︎︎ stances that cause us so much misery. That was the original motivation for Meaningness, and I want to get back to it.

My intention for Meaningness in the mid-2000s was a normal-length book, not the sprawling million-word monstrosity it has grown into. If I get time enough to write, I want to go back to that plan. A normal-length paperback summary introduction to the major themes: perhaps by the end of this year, if all goes very well!

Circumscription: a logical farce

Giant Arambourgiania pterosaurs arguing over a small theropod

Arambourgiania philadelphiae (CC↗︎︎) Mark Witton

Reality is unboundedly complex. Our knowledge of it is limited; in any practical situation, there are many relevant factors we are ignorant of. This creates deep problems for systematic rationality.

During the 1980s, I was involved in two different approaches to these difficulties. One was the logicist program↗︎︎ in artificial intelligence, developed by John McCarthy↗︎︎, a founder of the field overall. McCarthy concluded that standard mathematical logic could not address problems of incomplete knowledge. He and others developed alternative, non-monotonic logics↗︎︎ for the purpose. McCarthy called his version “circumscription↗︎︎.” His motivating example was the missionary and cannibals problem↗︎︎, a famous logical puzzle.

Logicism was opposed by Marvin Minsky↗︎︎, another founder of the field. I was a student of Minsky’s, and found his arguments against logicism convincing. But he didn’t have a coherent alternative.

By the mid-1980s, numerous serious obstacles in logicism became apparent, and the approach stalled. One was the Yale Shooting Problem↗︎︎, due to Drew McDermott↗︎︎, which showed that circumscription doesn’t work in general. McDermott, originally a student of Minsky, had switched to the logicist program, but in 1987 wrote a famous “Critique of Pure Reason↗︎︎,” arguing that the approach had failed.

Around the same time, Phil Agre↗︎︎ and I developed an alternative approach, influenced by ethnomethodology, the empirical study of practical action, which we learned primarily from Lucy Suchman.

A year ago, I started work on In the Cells of the Eggplant, a book about how to better use systematic rationality. It draws on what I came to understand in the 1980s about reasoning with incomplete knowlege. Since last October, my time has been taken up with family responsibilities, so I only began writing again a few weeks ago.

I have an unfortunate weakness for intricate, absurdist jokes. They make some of my most important essays↗︎︎ unnecessarily difficult to follow. I want The Eggplant to be as accessible as possible, so I keep removing jokes that might entertain some readers at the price of confusing most.

“Kill the kittens” is one of the best pieces of writing advice: remove anything you think is especially clever, that you are particularly fond of. It’s bound to be self-indulgent nonsense. The following explanation of circumscription is an extreme case. It belongs on the cutting room floor. And certainly not in the book! But I find it so cute that I can’t bear not to publish it as a blog post.

Couple more things to know before we get started. Dakinis↗︎︎ are Buddhist witches, sometimes described as cannibals, and known sometimes for their lustful appetites. And, the victim in the Yale Shooting Problem was named Fred. McDermott thought Fred was a turkey, but he may have been mistaken.

text separator

[MARVIN and JOHN are conversing on a river bank. LUCY and PHIL are standing off to one side. She is videotaping their conversation, and he is taking notes on a clipboard.]

Marvin: You know the missionary and cannibals problem↗︎︎?

John: Let us suppose, for the sake of this imaginary conversation, that I do not.

[Enter the CHORUS: three monks pursued by three dakinis↗︎︎.]

Monks, singing the Strophe↗︎︎: We three monks wish to cross this great expanse of water, to preach the Holy Dharma in the lands beyond. Alas, yonder raft can carry only two people.

John: Easy! Two of you go across, one comes back on the raft, picks up the other, you both cross to the far side, and you leave the raft behind↗︎︎.

Monks: Alas, we take our religious vows extremely seriously. Especially the one about↗︎︎… women.

Dakinis, singing the Antistrophe: We three dakinis could not help noticing that these monks look mighty… tasty. We’d surely like to… eat them.

Monks: No no! You must not… eat us!

Dakinis: If, at any time, on either bank, we outnumber the monks, they will not be able to resist our charms.

Monks: To maintain our vows, the number of monks on either bank must be equal to, or greater than the number of dakinis.

Dakinis: We also must cross the river, to continue our pursuit.

Monks: So, the problem is: what is the smallest number of raft trips that will get us all across the river, with no vow breakage?

Lucy: This is ridiculous.

Phil: And offensive.

John: In a moment, I will show how to formalize this classic puzzle in mathematical logic. But first, the informal solution. Uh… let’s see… 1. Two dakinis cross, leaving one with three monks on this side. 2. Then one dakini returns and picks up the remaining dakini and 3. takes her to the far bank. Now all the dakinis are on the far bank. 4. One dakini returns. 5. Two monks cross, and—

Marvin: Wrong! The answer is: zero.

John: … Zero?

Marvin: All the monks and dakinis can just walk over the bridge together.

John: You didn’t say there was a bridge!

Lucy: You didn’t look! It’s right in front of you!

Marvin, ignoring her: I didn’t say there wasn’t a bridge. You just invented this non-bridgeness out of thin air. You had no evidence for it, and no logical justification.

John: You should have told me! This isn’t a fair problem.

Phil: Life is complicated. There’s always lots of things you don’t know—and don’t know you don’t know.

Lucy: Although, you could look.

John: This is ridiculous. There’s no such thing as “non-bridgeness.” And you might as well say there could be a giant pterosaur that would carry everyone across.

Phil: Well, that would be ridiculous. However, realistic possibilities are still effectively infinite.

Lucy: You can’t plan for most of them. You have to improvise↗︎︎.

John: Any rational person would agree that I was solving the problem as stated. It’s implicitly implied that there’s no bridge. The general principle is: anything that isn’t explicitly stated, can be assumed to be false. I shall call this “circumscription↗︎︎.” It’s a vital extension to formal logic, to make it usable when you have incomplete knowledge.

Applied to action, we will assume that nothing changes unless we have knowledge that it will. We can call this “logical inertia.” When two of the Chorus cross the river on the raft, we can infer that the other four stay put, although that is not explicitly stated.

More generally, circumscription formalizes Occam’s Razor. When there are alternate possible explanations, it chooses the one that minimizes the number of violated assumptions.

[Enter DREW with a musket.]

Drew: Unfortunately, that won’t work.

John: Why not?

Drew, loading the musket: Because simply minimizing the number of violated assumptions does not always yield a unique solution, and the correct one may not even be among the minima.

Phil: Also, because there is, in fact, a bridge. The original reason to introduce circumscription was to logically infer that there isn’t one, which—

Lucy: LOOK OUT!

[FRED, a giant pterosaur, swoops down. Drew shoots at him, but Fred is unharmed. Fred circles back and carries all the monks and dakinis across the river.]

John: You missed!

Drew: My aim is true.

Fred, returning and settling beside them: Fortunately, the bullet fell out of the musket while you were all distracted by a giant pterosaur.

John: It’s logical to assume that the gun stayed loaded, and circumscription allows us to infer that.

Fred: It’s also logical to assume I stayed alive.

John: But we have explicit knowledge that Drew shot at you, which we should logically assume led to your death. Two against one!

Drew: But, as I was explaining before we were interrupted by a giant pterosaur, simply counting the number of assumptions doesn’t give correct results↗︎︎ in all cases. What we need is a theory of causality, and circumscription doesn’t give you that. Look, let’s write out the formulae on a, um, whiteboard…?

[Fred offers a wing to write on. Marvin, John, and Drew continue their good-natured debate, as old friends do.]

Phil, to Lucy: You got this all on tape?

Doing being rational: polymerase chain reaction

If we want to do rationality better, it will probably help to understand how we do it already. How about, for example, the polymerase chain reaction, a fundamental method in molecular genetics? Let’s take a look…

The middle part of my book In the Cells of the Eggplant explains an understanding of rationality that will be unfamiliar for most readers. It’s based on actual observation of how we do being rational.

That might seem like an obvious way to find out how rationality works, but it’s rare. Nearly all theories of rationality are philosophical speculations about how rationality ideally ought to work, based on abstract reasoning about rationality itself, without reference to any specific evidence. I call such theories “rationalisms.” The first part of the book points out numerous ways that rationality does not work the way rationalisms say, and could not even in principle. Such misunderstandings are obstacles to improvement.

The last part of the book suggests ways we can do rationality better, based on the understanding in the middle bit. That’s where the practical value is meant to be. This metablog post isn’t about that, though. It’s about the middle bit: how do we do rationality?

Ethnomethodology

Much of my understanding of that comes from ethnomethodology, which might be defined as “the empirical study of practical action.”1 A major method of ethnomethodologists is fanatically detailed analysis of video recordings. That gives insights where rationalist philosophical speculation cannot.

I believe ethnomethodological investigation can dramatically improve our understanding of science, engineering, and other technical professional activities, in ways that might massively pay off for society. It might even pay off for companies; in a few cases, ethnomethodological studies of business activities have produced large financial returns on investment.2 Unfortunately, there’s been nearly no funding for ethnomethodology in decades, and its potential practical value is mainly unrealized.

The Eggplant relies in part on specific studies in ethnomethodology, each based on fine-grained analysis of videos of technical professionals. Among them, for instance:

The Eggplant’s explanation of rationality begins with “The Parable of the Pebbles.” It demonstrates concretely key points in the meta-rational↗︎︎ understanding of rationality. Most of how rationality works is in this story, although that may not be obvious without the following discussion, which I haven’t published yet. But, it’s a parable—a made-up fable. In fact, it’s a standard, simplistic, armchair thought experiment from the philosophy of mathematics, normally used to derive rationalist conclusions. I had fun subverting it by making the story more realistic, adding details that show why the rationalist theory can’t work and how the alternative does. But this was still just made-up, and I might be fooling myself with philosophical speculation, in the same way the rationalists did.

Ideally, every point in The Eggplant would be grounded in extensive empirical work. Unfortunately, less has been done than I would like (due in part to funding problems). I can’t back everything I believe about rationality with studies from the literature. Partly to supplement the existing literature, and partly to test my own understanding, I decided a few days ago that I had better return to video analysis personally—something I had not done in decades. This post reports on my very first attempt, which went surprisingly well, I thought. Bear in mind, though, that I have no formal training in this field,3 and this is a report of casual amateurish observations inspired by ethnomethodology, not the real thing.

Observing rationality

Now here in the future, there’s how-to videos for everything on YouTube—a fantastic resource for learning↗︎︎, but perhaps also for research. “Everything” includes many activities we’d count as rational. The first one I thought of, at random, was the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Popping that into the YouTube search box found many videos, and I clicked on the first one that looked like a how-to demonstration, not a theoretical lecture:

This is a pedagogical performance, not a naturalistic record of routine activity, so it is not ideal. What someone does when being filmed demonstrating a technique might be significantly different from what they would do in their actual work. However, I went ahead with it because choosing the very first data available eliminates selection bias that could lead to confirmation bias. If I went looking for examples of what I believe about rationality, I could probably find some even if they are rare.

It turns out that some central themes of my story show up in this video, including ones that don’t appear in the parable of the pebbles. I’ll zoom in on some in this post. This is not meant to be anything like a complete analysis; I’m just going to point out a couple things I find interesting. You may want to watch the whole video first, and notice what aspects of rationality show up in it. That’s not necessary, though.

Also, PCR is incredibly cool, and worth understanding for its own sake, so you might like to read the short Britannica↗︎︎ explanation, or watch this Khan Academy video↗︎︎. But knowing about PCR is not necessary to understand the points I’ll make here.

Checklists: cognitive prostheses

Before diving into the video, let’s step back for a moment. The usual rationalist theory of action is that you should first reason out a “plan” in your mind; essentially, a program to achieve whatever you are trying to accomplish. Then you “execute” the plan, which means mentally running the program. This theory is impossible a priori, and also empirically false.4

We are hilariously incapable of remembering what we have done, what happened when we did it, and what’s supposed to happen next. We are able to be rational only by leaning on cognitive prostheses: physical aids, external to ourselves, that help keep track. Pen and paper, for example:

The physicist Richard Feynman once got into an argument with the historian Charles Weiner. Feynman understood the extended mind; he knew that writing his equations and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought. But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.” No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his thinking process. They were his thinking process:

“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.

“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”5

Imagine trying to write actual program code blindfolded. It’s impossible. In reality, your eyes are constantly flicking around the screen to look at what you’ve already done. Programmers prefer giant monitors so more of the context is visually accessible without scrolling or switching files.6

The simplest cognitive prosthesis for keeping track of what you have done, and what you need to do next, is a checklist. These can be literally life-saving: Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto↗︎︎ recounts that hospitals using surgical checklists dramatically decreased medical errors.

At 1:20 the PCR video explains:

As you add the reagent to the master mix, you tick off your working list to make sure that you know you’ve added your reagent, and that you don’t add double the volume that’s required.

Checklists: a cognitive prosthesis

These mistakes are easy to make. I have made them both many times myself when doing this kind of laboratory work! It’s the status of such mistakes that makes PCR a formally rational activity, and not a “merely reasonable↗︎︎” one (in the terminology of The Eggplant).7 If you miss or double a reagent, the results of your PCR are incorrect. Making waffles is a merely reasonable activity. If you forget to add oil to the batter, or space out and put it in twice, the results may be bad, or may even be inedible non-waffles, but they can’t be incorrect.8 This is marked linguistically: as in the title of the video, you perform PCR, meaning you do it rigidly, “by the book.” You don’t perform waffle-making, you just do it.9

In the video, you can see her check-marking a box on her paper worksheet after each reagent transfer. By analogy with a programming language runtime, she’s incrementing her program counter, stored externally on paper, after each operation.

Arranging equipment as a reminder

Needing a checklist is fairly uncommon. In most activities, you can usually see at a glance what you need to do next just by looking at the configuration of the objects you are already working with. (This was one main point of the Pengi program↗︎︎ I wrote with Phil Agre.10)

In some situations, you can’t see what to do next; in some, it just comes naturally that you can. In some other situations in which it’s not natural, you can arrange already-available objects to track your order of business, without needing a separate device for the purpose. As we wrote in the abstract-emergent paper,

Bicycle repair manuals tell you that when you disassemble some complex subassembly like a freewheel, put all the little pieces down on the ground in a row in the order you disassembled them. That’s because (if you know as much about freewheels as I do) the only available representation of the pieces is “weird little widgets.” They are indistinguishable from each other under this representation. Because quasi-static hardware can’t represent logical individuals, you can’t remember (much less reason about) which is which and what’s connected to what.

This story illustrates several themes of the paper. The manual’s advice is a piece of culturally transmitted metaknowledge that allows you to work around the limitations of your hardware in order to perform activity in a partly planned way. The plan—the order in which the freewheel should be reassembled—is not sufficient to completely determine the activity; you still have to be responsive to the situation to see just how each piece should be put back on. In fact, the plan is not even represented in your head, but externally, as a physical row of objects on the floor.

The components are the plan

At 1:35 in this video, he explains:

Now if you are unsure about anything, actually lay out the components in the order in which you take them off. That way is going to make reassembling a lot easier. Also if you’ve got a smartphone, perhaps take pictures as you go along.11

And at 5:02, you can see how he’s laid the pieces out, and he says:

Clean one piece at a time, so you are not disrupting the order at all, as there’s nothing worse than basically trying to put a jigsaw back together when you’re not maybe 100% sure which part goes where!

This tip has saved my bacon several times in various mechanical disassembly/reassembly tasks. If you learn nothing else about rationality from Meaningness, this advice alone is worth the price of admission.

It has probably also saved the scientist in the PCR video a few times. If you watch carefully, you can see that she’s arranged the reagents along the back edge of the ice bucket in the order they get added to the master mix. (That’s the back edge from her point of view—it’s the edge closest to the camera.) So she works her way left to right (from her point of view) through the reagents. That redundancy may have saved her in even this fake, for-the-camera performance of the procedure: she actually fails to tick off the first reagent (“buffer”), at about 0:58!

Anomalies

Something very interesting happens during the next minute. I didn’t notice it until I’d watched the video about twenty times! Maybe you can see if you can spot it:

What’s happening here?

I’m going to give you a series of clues and then an explanation. You may want to try watching that minute’s worth of video repeatedly as I give more clues? Or just skip ahead if that’s not fun.

You’ll need to know how a pipette works to understand the full story. If you aren’t familiar with pipetting, this clear, two-minute how-to video explains everything you need to know:

Or you can read the Wikipedia article↗︎︎. But if you don’t want to bother, you can get a general sense of what happens without knowing about pipettes.

Watch the video again carefully from 0:58 and see what you see?

Below the video, commenter Nguyễn Xuân Tài observes that “At 1:12 the technician throws the pipette.” Can you figure out why? (Two other commenters reply “Yes she did” but no one explains.)

You might want to watch just the few seconds around that point a few times and maybe you’ll spot it.

Here’s the narration:

The next reagent is magnesium chloride. Between reagents, always make sure you change the tip, so you don’t contaminate your reagents. Magnesium chloride will be added. Pipettes are used to ensure you get the correct volume of each reagent. As you add the reagent to your master mix, you tick off your working list to make sure you’ve added your reagent, and that you don’t add double the volume that’s required. OK. So the next reagent will be magnesium chloride.

What’s anomalous in that?

Watch again, paying attention to what happens at the anomalous moments in the narration?

A detailed transcript

The anomalies
0:56
finishes adding buffer to the master mix tube
the next reagent is
1:00
ejects the tip, off camera, but you can hear the click
magnesium chloride
1:04
attaches a new tip from yellow box
between reagents, always make sure you change tips, so you don’t contaminate
1:08
inserts the tip in the magnesium chloride tube
your reagents
1:10
ejects tip
magnesium chloride [momentary pause, voice trails off]: will be aaa…
1:12
slams pipette down on bench, simultaneously picks up a different pipette with other hand
1:13
adjusts volume knob on new pipette
1:15
ticks worksheet, throws down pen
1:16
continues volume adjustment
pipettes are used to ensure you get the correct volume of each reagent
1:22
puts down pipette, opens new blue box of tips, with some difficulty
as you add the reagent to your master mix, you tick off your working list to make sure that you’ve, you know you’ve added your reagent, and that you don’t add double the volume that’s required
1:33
attaches blue tip
[swallowed, nearly inaudible]: okay
1:36
picks up magnesium chloride tube
so the next reagent will be magnesium chloride
1:39
aspirates magnesium chloride
ah, ah, magnesium chloride helps the enzyme to anneal to the DNA strand
1:45
dispenses magnesium chloride into master mix tube
the enzyme used is Taq polymerase, which is added at the end

Now do you get what’s going on?

Repair

Repair is a major theme in ethnomethodology. Everything is constantly going wrong, because the world is nebulous↗︎︎, so your actions don’t do what you meant them to. This is nearly always unproblematic, because you know how to do something else that repairs the problem. You just do it almost without thought; and so the pervasiveness of minor breakdowns and repairs is invisible. It only shows up when you do careful video analysis. Then you see that in most activity—including technical, rational activity—repairs occur startlingly often. Repair is a big part of the circumrational work we do to make rationality work, because the world is never quite as any rational theory supposes.

How many repairs can you find in these 49 seconds?

Her actions are part of two different simultaneous streams of activity, each with breakdowns and repairs. On one level, a scientist is “performing” a polymerase chain reaction. The other level is a pedagogical “performance,” by actors who happen also to be scientists, of a staged how-to video. For meta-rational purposes, only the science level is relevant. Here’s my take on some key events in that:

  1. After adding the buffer, she forgets to tick it off on the worksheet.
  2. After ejecting the buffer tip, she continues using the same pipette, picks up a new tip, and goes to aspirate the magnesium chloride. The instant before doing so, she realizes she’s forgotten to adjust the volume for the new reagent, which is less than for the buffer. In fact, she will need to use a different pipette to pick up the smaller volume.
  3. She slams down the large pipette because she’s annoyed by the flub.12
  4. While adjusting the volume on the small pipette, she realizes she forgot to tick off the buffer. She abandons the adjustment to do that, lest she forgets again, throws down the pen in hurried irritation, and then returns to the interrupted task.

So there’s two skillful repairs in that: switching to the correct pipette after starting to use the wrong one, and remembering to tick the worksheet after forgetting. Both of these would be automatic in the routine activity of PCR, and totally unproblematic so long as you did eventually apply them.

It seems likely that both errors were due in part to feeling self-conscious due to being on camera. From other clues in the video I also suspect this was the umpteenth live take, and she was sick of the whole thing, which makes one more prone to careless mistakes.

Repairing the video

Whereas the errors would be unproblematic in the course of doing science, flubs in a how-to video might be embarrassing. However, I totally missed them until I’d watched it about a million times.

That’s partly due to skillful repair work on the part of the narrator. I’ll point out some of these, although they are not relevant to technical rationality or the Eggplant project. (You may want to skip ahead over this, to get to the conclusion of the post, where I explain why you might care about the rest of it.)

Before reading on here, you might consider the question: why does he use the word “so” in “so the next reagent will be magnesium chloride” at 1:36? What work is that word doing there?

The great thing about YouTube is that you need zero knowledge of video production to make films that vast numbers of people derive significant practical or entertainment value from. This PCR video has had 224,580 views as I write this.

Probably a professional would have filmed it without narration, and added that as a voice-over later. And they would have “repaired” action errors (like using the wrong pipette) by splicing together bits of a few different takes. Here the senior scientist did the narration in real time, and they filmed the whole procedure in a continuous take.13 His repairs concealed her action errors from me the first many times I watched the film, as well as covering up clues in his own performance that something had gone wrong.

  1. At 1:10, a second after she realizes she’s using the wrong pipette, he also realizes, because she goes to eject the tip without doing a transfer. This is where “… will be added” trails off.
  2. He’s silent for ten seconds, perhaps considering what to do—should this video take be aborted?
  3. During those seconds, she fluently repairs the error, and apparently he decides to go with it, without comment.
  4. At 1:16, probably primed by the salient volume error, he says “pipettes are used to ensure you get the correct volume of each reagent.” This comment is otherwise somewhat unmotivated and out-of-place; logically, it belongs at the beginning of the demonstration, when she first starts using one. It fills space as she gets back on track, though, deflecting the viewer’s attention from “wait, what did I just see?”
  5. At 1:22, he comments on the worksheet-ticking, perhaps having just realized himself that she’d forgotten to do this earlier. His distracting patter also fills what would be an awkward silence, during which the viewer might otherwise start to figure out that something has gone wrong.
  6. Why does he say “okay” in a strangled whisper at 1:33?
  7. He repeats “the next reagent will be magnesium chloride.” I totally missed that he is now saying this the third time. Why didn’t I notice?
  8. He continues with an explanation of the function of the magnesium chloride; maybe that distracts from the anomaly of the triple repetition.14
Dog on fire: okay so this is fine

So about that “so.” In ethnomethodological conversation analysis, there’s a large literature on “so” at the beginning of utterances. Galina Bolden went through 80 hours of recorded conversations, and found and analyzed the 250 utterance-initial “so”s in them.15 There are several distinct functions of “so,” of course; it can mean “therefore,” for example. The relevant function here is to communicate the intent to return to “a course of action has been interrupted or subverted in some way before coming to a possible completion” (in Bolden’s words). It’s a conversational repair method for an intended activity that has gone off track. This is, of course, exactly what happened with the addition of magnesium chloride.

This use of “so” communicates that the project of the utterance following does not relate to the immediately preceding activity, so that context is no longer relevant and should not be used to interpret what comes next. If the hearer accepts this move, their conceptual attention reorients to the new topic, and it is likely that the interrupting event will be immediately forgotten. In this case, if the viewer of the video is vaguely aware that something has gone wrong, that is likely to drop out of consciousness: especially since the “new” topic is the familiar “old” one, adding magnesium chloride.16

So?

So what have we learned from all this?

  • If highly-trained scientists can’t follow a familiar laboratory procedure without occasional goofs, and rely heavily on external cognitive prostheses to keep track of what they are doing, the rationalist theory that action derives from mental execution of programs is refuted.
  • If the sorts of phenomena ethnomethodologists identify as typical of reasonable action show up frequently in the first brief video of technically rational practice I looked at, it’s plausible that they are pervasive in STEM fields. (As, in fact, some ethnomethodological studies have found.)
  • If a catalog of such phenomena can be extended to cover most rational activity, it’s plausible that we can construct an empirically accurate, non-rationalist theory of rationality, including scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematical practice.
  • If rationality works because we make it work—a slogan of The Eggplant, explained briefly in the Parable of the Pebbles—and not because it is Cosmically Correct, then it is plausible that we can make it work better through interventions based on more accurate understanding.
  • If rationality typically involves frequent minor breakdowns and repairs, it is plausible, as one example of the previous point, that empirical examination and understanding of their causes is one route to meta-rational improvement of rational practice.
  • 1. Actual ethnomethodologists would probably look pained at this definition, and at minimum would want to add numerous caveats, and might reject it altogether.
  • 2. The outstanding example is Julian Orr’s study of the social epistemology of Xerox repair people, reported in his Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job↗︎︎. This led to $100 million in savings for Xerox (John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “Balancing Act: How to Capture Knowledge Without Killing It↗︎︎,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000.)
  • 3. I spent three months at Xerox PARC in 1989, casually hanging out with the ethnomethodologists there, from whom I feel I learned an enormous amount by tacit apprenticeship. I’m grateful to Lucy Suchman, Jean Lave, Gitte Jordan, and others, for their kindness to an immature and arrogant computer geek.
  • 4. See Philip E. Agre, Computation and Human Experience↗︎︎, particularly Chapter 8; and my Vision, Instruction, and Action↗︎︎, particularly Chapter 2 and section 3.1.
  • 5. Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better↗︎︎ (2013).
  • 6. Since writing this, I have learned that there are fully blind programmers. They use utilities that read a line of the program out loud, sped up enormously. After years of practice, they dart around the code base by ear in the same way that a sighted programmer darts around by eye. They also report developing their memories, both long term (API function signatures for example) and short term (the immediate code environment), well beyond what sighted programmers are capable of. Inspiring!
  • 7. Most fields studying “rationality,” including ethnomethodology, use the word to cover both everyday “reasonableness” and technical, systematic, formal rationality. I find it helpful to use different terms for the two in order to pick apart clearly how they relate to each other.
  • 8. Whether the waffles are bad, or inedible, is—in ethnomethodological terms—a matter of hermeneutic, accountable interpretation and negotiation. (Your family gets a say, and will definitely have opinions.) Whether your performance of PCR is incorrect is—almost always—an objective fact, in the sense that a group of observers watching over your shoulder would agree.
  • 9. Unless somehow you have an audience↗︎︎ for your performance.
  • 10. Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, “Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity↗︎︎,” Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1987, pp. 268-272. With The Eggplant, I appear to be mostly just rewriting my PhD thesis↗︎︎ thirty years after the fact. This is lazy and stupid, and someone should organize an intervention to force me to think of something new to say.
  • 11. The video is about “cartridge hub bearings.” Cartridge hubs are a simpler, better technology that replaced freewheels a couple years after I wrote the abstract-emergent paper. They’re basically the same thing, except with a million weird little widgets in them instead of a billion.
  • 12. It would be more ethnomethodologically correct to say that we can see she’s displaying annoyance. We can’t see inside her head, but we can see this as communication. Put in words, she might be saying to the narrator, apparently her doctoral supervisor: “This is the fifteenth time we’ve been through this, and every single time one of us screws something up and we have to start over. I’ve done about as much of this as I’m willing to; I want to go back to being a scientist, instead of playing one on TV.” This is just speculation, in the absence of additional context. That she is displaying irritation is an objective fact, however.
  • 13. Actually, there are two splices, at 2:55 and 3:31, so they did know how to do that. I can guess what the second splice is repairing; I have no idea about the first. I also don’t know why they didn’t splice out her errors and replace them with footage from another take.
  • 14. Although this was a highly skillful series of repairs, I doubt it was calculated. Such conversational methods operate at the threshold of awareness, like most “merely reasonable” activity. Rationality typically (but not always) requires explicit thinking-through.
  • 15. Galina B. Bolden, “Implementing incipient actions: The discourse marker ‘so’ in English conversation↗︎︎,” Journal of Pragmatics Volume 41, Issue 5, May 2009, Pages 974-998. Her paper also includes a useful review of prior research.
  • 16. Computer people can think of this by analogy with context switching↗︎︎ in an operating system’s process scheduler. Ethnomethodologists will find this analysis of mental events unacceptably cognitivist. It’s sheer speculation (like most cognitivist theorizing). Sorry. I’m humbled by the empiricism of anyone who can work through 80 hours of painstakingly transcribed conversation.

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Comments on “How To Think Real Good”

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Going down on the phenomenon

Tongariro Red Crater

Tongariro↗︎︎ Red Crater; image courtesy markunti↗︎︎

[I wrote the following in 1992, while I was working on “How To Think Real Good.” I hope its relevance to that project is obvious.]

Francis Bacon↗︎︎, the ideological founder of modern science, constructed an extensive and explicit analogy between science and rape. Nature is a woman whom the boldly masculine scientist forces to yield her secrets by sexual domination.

Feminist philosophers of science, such as Evelyn Fox Keller↗︎︎, have suggested that many scientists still see their work this way.1 They argue that, besides being icky, this approach is unlikely to lead to good science, for the same reason it is unlikely to lead to good sex. One may achieve domination over nature (as indeed we partly have) but one is unlikely to achieve understanding, respect, or (most importantly) delight.

Keller suggests that alternative sexual metaphors are possible. We can not only deconstruct but supplant the Baconian system. Her contribution is the notion of “wet data.” She suggests that the term “hard data” has an obvious underlying sexual sense. Hard data are worshiped by many scientists. As hard as possible: you want to force out of the instrument every decimal place you can get. More interesting, she thinks, are wet data: ones that may be preliminary but lead in intriguing, if perhaps still ambiguous, directions.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about how to describe the way I think research is best done. I’ve taken inspiration from the Hermetic natural philosophers↗︎︎, who like their contemporaries Bacon and Descartes conceived of science sexually, but as ecstatic union rather than as rape.

I’d like to suggest that the process of good research is like cunnilingus.

For the Baconian, one’s attitude toward the phenomenon is one of contempt or enmity. One is unlikely to approach cunnilingus this way. Some other scientists describe their attitude as humility; they are awed by the vastness of the world and of what is unknown. This I think is more likely to foster learning, but perhaps typically of relatively superficial, detailed facts. The best research, I think, is engendered by taking the phenomenon as a respected equal. D. A. Schön↗︎︎ described this as “a reflective conversation with the situation↗︎︎”; conversation is only possible with an equal.

To do good work, one must get up-close and personal with the phenomenon. Scientists sometimes talk about “not wanting to get their hands dirty” and about the distasteful necessity of doing so. I would rather say: you have to be willing to get your face wet. The revulsion some scientists have for getting too close to the subject matter does seem parallel to the revulsion some people have for going down. Of course in both cases unless you are seriously hung up you are liable to find, when you try it, that you like it.

Not getting too close to the phenomenon is often justified in terms of “objectivity.” The supposed value of objectivity is that one’s personal prejudices are eliminated. I have not observed this to be the case in practice; and in any case, I believe it is undesirable (as well as impossible) to eliminate the personal from research. I suggest, rather, that one must do research with respect for both the phenomenon and oneself. One must be willing to approach the phenomenon it on its own terms, and one must also honor one’s personal and quirky way of working. Neither of these is encouraged by contemporary scientific ideology.

To give good head you must not lean too heavily on what you already know. Every woman is different, and different each time. An attitude of “I’m going to make you come because I have great technique” is very similar to “I’m going to make this experiment work because I am so brilliant,” and neither works well. This setting aside of one’s existing skills and knowledge and hopes and fears is parallel to objectivity, but distinct. The aim is not to distance oneself from the phenomenon, nor from oneself.

Beyond respect, one must care about the phenomenon. It seems to me that most academic intellectuals I talk to do not genuinely care about their subject matter. They are more interested in getting papers out of it than they are in learning about it. Analogously, many people in approaching sex are more interested in getting something out of someone than they are in learning about another person (and themselves).

A research program typically starts out well, with some exciting preliminary and superficial explorations; and cunnilingus often starts with a relatively brief phase of gentle touching that seems very exciting at first. But then you settle down to serious licking, and this phase is usually frustrating. Often for a long time it seems as though nothing much is going to happen. Your neck hurts and your tongue aches and you wonder if you are ever going to get anywhere. Research is mostly like this. You keep working away at it and you get nowhere, even though you are pretty sure you are doing the right thing. The key thing here is to be attentive to the feedback you are getting from the subject matter. If you keep on mechanically doing the same thing, following recognized procedures, you may get a publication but you won’t learn anything. You have to interpret subtle shifts in the subject matter as telling you what to do differently. (Keller, writing about Barbara McClintock↗︎︎’s work on maize transposons, terms this “a feeling for the organism↗︎︎.” It’s the same whether the organism is an ear of corn or another person.)

Presently there comes a point at which you realize you are definitely onto something. Often you can’t tell quite where your investigations are taking you, but you get a strong sense that the subject matter is going somewhere. Pieces of a story start to emerge; while the shape of the eventual discovery is as yet unclear, you are confident that it is on its way. Similarly, there is usually a distinct point at which her breathing or muscle tension changes to tell you that yes, she’s going to come. It’s not clear yet when or what it will be like, but it’s on its way. At this point, with a sense of excitement, you renew your commitment to the task. It can still happen that, frustratingly, you never get anywhere, but the signal itself is still clear: something real was happening, and if you return to that point on another occasion, as one often returns to a half-written paper a couple years later, you will be given another chance.

Finally there is that exhilarating moment when the subject matter grabs your head by the legs and pulls you along on a wild ride. This can be frightening and uncomfortable, but you have to go with it, not try to control it, let the subject matter take over. The myth of the sober scientist is hooey; if discovery is not intoxicating, you are doing something very wrong. Very suddenly the project you have been working on for months takes off: you have a rush of discoveries that lead in unexpected directions, all the pieces fall into place, the shape of the whole becomes apparent. Hard work is rewarded.

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Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

Mop
Image courtesy↗︎︎ Wikimedia

Subcultures are dead. I plan to write a full obituary soon.

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

(You can read very brief previews of my analysis of subculture dynamics in this table and/or this page.)

The muggles who invade and ruin subcultures come in two distinct flavors, mops and sociopaths, playing very different roles. This insight was influenced by Venkatesh Rao’s Gervais Principle↗︎︎, an analysis of workplace dynamics. Rao’s theory is hideous, insightful nihilism↗︎︎; I recommend it.1

The birth of cool

Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.

The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.

Creators and fanatics are both geeks.2 They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.

If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.

If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops.3 Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.

Geeks welcome mops, at first at least. It’s the mass of mops who turn a scene into a subculture. Creation is always at least partly an act of generosity; creators want as many people to use and enjoy their creations as possible. It’s also good for the ego; it confirms that the New Thing really is exciting, and not just a geek obsession. Further, some money can usually be extracted from mops—just enough, at this stage, that some creators can quit their day jobs and go pro. (Fanatics contribute much more per head than mops, but there are few enough that it’s rarely possible for creatives to go full time with support only from fanatics.) Full-time creators produce more and better of the New Thing.

The mop invasion

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

Mops relate to each other in “normal” ways, like people do on TV, which the fanatics find repellent. During intermission, geeks want to talk about the New Thing, but mops blather about sportsball and celebrities. Also, the mops also seem increasingly entitled, treating the fanatics as service workers.

Fanatics may be generous, but they signed up to support geeks, not mops. At this point, they may all quit, and the subculture collapses.

The sociopath invasion

Unless sociopaths5 show up. A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital↗︎︎, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital↗︎︎: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.

The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.

Mops are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators. At this stage, they take their pick of the best-looking mops to sleep with. They’ve extracted the cultural capital.

The sociopaths also work out how to monetize mops—which the fanatics were never good at. With better publicity materials, the addition of a light show, and new, more crowd-friendly product, admission fees go up tenfold, and mops are willing to pay. Somehow, not much of the money goes to creators. However, more of them do get enough to go full-time, which means there’s more product to sell.

The sociopaths also hire some of the fanatics as actual service workers. They resent it, but at least they too get to work full-time on the New Thing, which they still love, even in the Lite version. The rest of the fanatics get pushed out, or leave in disgust, broken-hearted.

The death of cool—unless…

After a couple years, the cool is all used up: partly because the New Thing is no longer new, and partly because it was diluted into New Lite, which is inherently uncool. As the mops dwindle, the sociopaths loot whatever value is left, and move on to the next exploit. They leave behind only wreckage: devastated geeks who still have no idea what happened to their wonderful New Thing and the wonderful friendships they formed around it. (Often the geeks all end up hating each other, due first to the stress of supporting mops, and later due to sociopath divide-and-conquer manipulation tactics.)

Unless some of the creators are geniuses. If they can give the New Thing genuine mass appeal, they can ascend into superstardom. The subculture will reorganize around them, into a much more durable form. I won’t go into that in there. I will point out that this almost never happens without sociopaths. An ambitious creator may know they have mass-appeal genius, and could be a star, but very rarely do they know how to get from here to there.

Resistance

So what is to be done?

This is a geek question. The subculture lifecycle is a problem only from a geek perspective. As far as mops are concerned, it provides reliable, low-cost waves of novelty entertainment and casual social relationships. As far as sociopaths are concerned, it generates easily-exploited pools of prestige, sex, power, and money.

From a utilitarian point of view, mops hugely outnumber geeks, so in terms of total social value, it’s all good. Can’t make omelettes without breaking some eggheads.

So what is to be done?

Geeks can refuse to admit mops. In fact, successful subcultures always do create costly barriers to entry, to keep out the uncommitted.6 In the heyday of subcultures, those were called poseurs↗︎︎.7 Mop exclusion keeps the subculture comfortable for geeks, but severely limits its potential. Often there’s a struggle between geeks who like their cozy little club as it is, and geeks who want a shot at greatness—for themselves, or the group, or the New Thing. In any case, subculture boundaries are always porous, and if the New Thing is cool enough, mops will get in regardless.

The optimal mop:geek ratio is maybe 6:1. At that ratio, the mops provide more energy than they consume. A ratio above about 10:1 becomes unworkable; it’s a recipe for burnout among supporting fanatics. Ideally, the ratio could be controlled. I think few subcultures understand this imperative, and I’m not sure how it could be done even if one did understand. Mops move in herds. Usually either there are only a few, or their numbers quickly grow too large.

Sociopaths only show up if there’s enough mops to exploit, so excluding (or limiting) mops is a strategy for excluding sociopaths. Some subcultures do understand this, and succeed with it.

Alternatively, you could recognize sociopaths and eject them. Geeks may be pretty good at the recognizing, but are lousy at the ejecting. Mops don’t recognize sociopaths, and anyway don’t care. Mops have little investment in the subculture, and can just walk away when sociopaths ruin it. By the time sociopaths show up, mops are numerically most of the subculture. Sociopaths manipulate the mops, and it’s hard for the geeks to overrule an overwhelming majority.

Anyway, horribly, geeks need sociopaths—if the New Thing is ever going to be more than a geeky hobby, or a brief fad that collapses under the weight of the mop invasion.

So what is to be done?

Be slightly evil

The subcultural mode mostly ended around 2000. There still are subcultures, new ones all the time, but they no longer have the cultural and social force they used to. The “classical model” of subcultures no longer works, for the reasons given here, plus others I’ll describe in upcoming writing. I don’t think it can be rescued.

However, the fluid mode—my hoped-for future—resembles the subcultural mode in many ways. The same social dynamics may play out, unless there is a powerful antidote.

A slogan of Rao’s may point the way: Be slightly evil↗︎︎. Or: geeks need to learn and use some of the sociopaths’ tricks. Then geeks can capture more of the value they create (and get better at ejecting true sociopaths).

Specific strategies for sociopathy are outside the scope of this book. However, I have an abstract suggestion.

Rao concludes his analysis by explaining that his “sociopaths” are actually nihilists↗︎︎, in much the same sense as I use the word. Serious subcultures are usually eternalistic↗︎︎: the New Thing is a source of meaning that gives everything in life purpose. Eternalistic naïveté makes subcultures much easier to exploit.

“Slightly evil” defense of a subculture requires realism: letting go of eternalist hope and faith in imaginary guarantees that the New Thing will triumph. Such realism is characteristic of nihilism. Nihilism has its own delusions, though. It is worth trying to create beautiful, useful New Things—and worth defending them against nihilism. A fully realistic worldview corrects both eternalistic and nihilistic errors.

Combining what works in eternalism and nihilism amounts to the complete stance↗︎︎—which is essentially the same thing as the “fluid mode.”

  • 1.

    Rao postulates three groups in any organization: the Clueless, the Losers, and the Sociopaths. The Clueless mistakenly believe that the organization is actually supposed to do whatever it pretends to be for: selling widgets, saving endangered herons, or educating school-children, for instance. They are dedicated to this mission and work hard, and creatively, to further it. The Losers have a job because they need a paycheck; their motivation is to make work reasonably pleasant in exchange for minimal effort. The Sociopaths recognize the reality that the organization is just the setting for a power game played among themselves. Nobody really cares about widgets, herons, or other people’s children. The Losers also understand this, but don’t have what it takes to play the game.

    In subcultures, Geeks are roughly parallel to the Clueless; they are passionate about whatever the subculture is supposedly about. Mops substitute for Losers: they show up for a reasonably pleasant time in exchange for minimal effort. Sociopaths are Sociopaths. The detailed dynamics are rather different, though; for instance, the Gervais Principle says that organizations begin with Sociopaths and end up with mostly Clueless, whereas subcultures begin with Geeks and end with mostly Mops.

  • 2. I’m using “geek” here to mean “someone fascinated by the details of a subject most people don’t care about.” There’s another sense of “geek,” meaning the sort of person you’d expect to find at a science fiction convention. There’s significant overlap, but in the first sense there are gardening geeks and golfing geeks, and most probably aren’t geeks in the second sense. They might create gardening subcultures, though.
  • 3. “MOP” is an abbreviation for “member of the public”; it seems to be fairly common in Britain. My American (mis-)use of it here is probably somewhat non-standard. Other terms that could be used are “casuals” or “tourists.”
  • 4. All the categories here—creators, fanatics, mops, sociopaths—are necessarily nebulous↗︎︎: ambiguous and changing over time. There is no “fact of the matter” about whether someone is an unusually enthusiastic mop, or a fanatic who is less committed than some other fanatics; nor whether someone who creates occasionally but mainly acts to support the subculture counts as a fanatic or creator. Anyone may shift roles, too.
  • 5. I am using “sociopath” here in Rao’s informal sense, not a technical, clinical one.
  • 6. I’ll discuss these barriers more extensively in upcoming writing.
  • 7. “Poseur” was perhaps directed even more at sociopaths than mops, but didn’t clearly distinguish between the two.

Robots That Dance

Cartoon of a dancing robot
Friendly AI: art courtesy↗︎︎ powdrtostman

Robots, as artificial humans, reflect how we think about ourselves—a major topic of Meaningness. Popular ideas about what it means to be human, and science fiction about what robots could be, strongly influence academic research in cognitive science and neuroscience. Advances in science, engineering, and philosophy also feed back into popular understanding of humanness.

I wrote this informal robotics research proposal sometime around 1990. I didn’t pursue it—this was just before I left the field—and didn’t publish it. However, it was widely circulated electronically, and I think it influenced other researchers’ work. It was probably premature, and may still be, but it articulates themes that, after a couple of decades of neglect, have started to reemerge in cognitive science, robotics, and artificial intelligence research.

For readers of Meaningness, it explains some aspects of being human that are central to the account of meaning that pervades the book. (Actually writing that still seems assigned to the distant future, so this may be helpful background.) Understanding the proposal mostly requires no knowledge of robotics; just ignore the technical bits.

For AI and robotics researchers, this might suggest fresh approaches. Most of what I proposed has not been seriously attempted—not, I think, because it is too difficult, but because it was so different from the then-mainstream. Some of these ideas are similar to ones that have come again into vogue, so this may be timely.

[Update/follow-up: Uri Bram↗︎︎ interviewed me about this essay, and other aspects of Meaningness, for Nautilus Magazine, in The Limits of Formal Learning, or Why Robots Can’t Dance↗︎︎. It was a great conversation; check it out!]

I want to build a robot that can dance to rock & roll with a partner. You know, the type of loose dancing you do at parties, where there aren’t any predetermined moves but (if you are any good at it) you respond to your partner’s motions in various ways.

Why build a dancing robot?

This project calls the bluff on a lot of the rhetoric I and other situated↗︎︎ types have been spouting for the last few years. Dancing is an activity that has all the characteristics that we have argued are typical and which the blocks world↗︎︎ lacks.

Dancing is an on-going activity. There’s no goal to be achieved. You can’t win or lose. It’s not a problem to be solved. There’s no way to do it “right” or criterion of success. You get incrementally better at it with experience. Most real activities are like this.

Partner dance is a social activity. Good dancing is a collaborative accomplishment of the two people involved. Most of the social activities we’ve looked at are predominantly cognitive and require language use, and are therefore difficult. Dancing is noncognitive and does not requires language.

Dancing involves nonverbal communication and synchronization. I believe that understanding these is a prerequisite to understanding “more advanced” sorts of representation and intentionality.

Dancing requires a real body with real perception. However, the motor and visual tasks are very different from those that are taken as prototypical by current robotics and vision research, and are, I think, more typical. Dancing is paradigmatically a process of interaction – interaction with your own body, with the surrounding space, and most importantly with your partner.

Dancing is a good domain for looking at learning by apprenticeship and imitation. You don’t learn to dance by reading a book or by proving theorems or by being told or by doing experiments in a laboratory, you learn it by doing it with someone who is better at it than you are. I claim that this is the primordial and most important form of learning.

The experience of embodiment

Dancing is an experience of one’s own body. AI, when it talks about bodies at all, thinks of them as tools that are somewhere down the hall and which you use to execute plans. But we typically experience ourselves as being our bodies – never more so than when dancing.

In dancing, you coordinate four sources of ongoing experience: your experience of your body, your visual experience of your partner, the music, and what you are feeling.

  • Your experience of your body consists both of what you are doing and what’s happening as a result. Often what happens isn’t quite what you expect; it puts you off-balance or feels too tight or loose or jerky or smooth, and this feeling is part of the experience that contributes to what you will do next.
  • As you dance, you watch what your partner is doing, and do something that complements that. You may adopt a similar style or rhythm, follow his changes, suggest new patterns, act mock fear in response to mock aggression, and so on. All this follows from an ability to experience your partner’s activity (typically visually in this sort of dancing).
  • As you dance, you listen to the music, and you do things that feel like what the music feels like. If the music is nervous you might dance jerkily; if it is menacing you might dance violently; if it is sexy you might dance suggestively. And, of course, your motions will typically be timed to coincide with the beat.
  • Dancing is an emotional business; it brings up feelings, and your dance orients to those feelings.

Taking dance as a prototype of activity will force us to develop ideas about representations that are kinesthetic. Introspectively, it seems to me that much of even abstract reasoning, when I’m proving a theorem for example, involves imagining performing bodily operations on imaginary spatial objects. (The vocabulary of mathematics supports this; we talk of “retractions” and “surgery” and “pumping” for example.) I believe that such representations are very important and that they underlie the sorts of representations we are used to thinking about. There’s a lot of developmental psychological evidence for this, and evidence also from linguistics. For example, an awful lot of the vocabulary for describing the shapes and motions of inanimate objects are derived from the vocabulary for describing human body parts and actions.

Taking dance as a prototype of activity will also force us to develop ideas about representations as temporal. Not just representations of time, like interval algebras, but representations in time. I believe that mental activity has rhythms that reflect the rhythms of the physical activity we are engaged in, and that a structural coupling between these two rhythms, somewhat after the manner of a phase-locked loop, is both an integral part of our ability to engage in the concrete activity and in itself constitutes a representation of the temporal structure of that activity. This is a very different sort of representation from those taught in computer science courses; it is a representation by a process, not by a token.

Pursuing this project would require a much deeper understanding of the phenomenology of dance than I have. For a start, I would want to look hard at a lot of videotape of people dancing and to talk to dance teachers about the learning process.

Perception

Kinesthetic and temporal representation require kinesthetic and temporal perception. Phenomenologically, we perceive gestures kinesthetically. We feel what another person is doing. In imitating a partner’s dance style, the task is to make your body do something that the actions you see feel like. Mechanistically, this probably means that the visual scene is “represented” in the same terms we use to represent our experience of our own bodies.

Dance orients to rhythm, and so rhythm perception, leading to rhythmic representation, is key. You must perceive both the rhythm of the music and the rhythm of your partner’s dance. I’ve argued elsewhere (in the abstract-emergent paper) that the ability to perceive rhythm and simultaneity is very important for learning more generally.

The vision “problem” in dancing is very different from the vision problems usually studied. In particular, no object recognition is involved. At most you have to pick out your partner from the background, and this might well be finessed in implementation by having the partner wear special clothes and dance against a contrasting backdrop. Similar, it is not necessary to build an accurate CAD-type model of the object of interest. Agre, Horswill↗︎︎, and I have argued elsewhere that an emphasis on object recognition and solid modeling as the goal of vision is misguided. The task here is rather to characterize your partner’s dancing in terms of the sorts of representation I’ve been discussing. What is needed is to perceive the temporal structure of your partner’s actions and their “manner”: are they sinuous or frenetic or emphatic or blithe? It may be useful, particularly when trying to imitate particular gestures, to compute a model of the partner’s body’s position in phase space (joint angles and velocities), but this model probably need not be very accurate, and probably is not a precursor to perceiving “manner”.

The music perception task is parallel to the vision one in these ways; what is needed is to extract the basic beat and feel, but no detailed representation is necessary or useful.

To dance you must also perceive your own body. I’ll take this up in the next section.

Mechanical issues

Robotics is traditionally obsessed with assembly tasks; these demand accurate positioning of manipulators. The trend toward mobile robotics and navigation as an alternative is I believe salutary. Developmentally, tasks involving accurate manipulation appear well after the child is routinely and accomplishedly using its body in other ways. Dancing does not require accurate limb control. This makes most of robotics inapplicable, and fortunately eliminates most of traditional robotics’s problems.

The approach robotics has taken to accurate manipulation control has been to make manipulators which can be commanded accurately and to develop mathematical theories of manipulator dynamics. This has meant in particular that robot manipulators have been rigid, because flexible manipulators can not be commanded accurately. Rigid manipulators are heavy, and consequently power-hungry; we couldn’t build a dancing robot based on current manipulator technology because it would be extremely dangerous and because it would be impossible to get enough power to it. But a dancing robot could be built with plastic limbs, with some flex in the members and backlash in the joints. It could be light enough to be safe and might even have low enough power requirements not to need a tether.

There’s not much feedback you can get from a rigid manipulator: the joint angles and their time derivatives tell you everything you could know. But in a flexible body, you can get a lot of complex feedback back, in the form of measurements of the deformations of the flexible members and of the backlash in the joints. This provides rich lived experience: the sensory signals on which kinesthetic representation can be based.

Because dancing is not a manipulation task, all the standard problems of robotics like inverse dynamics go away. You don’t need to accurately control the end-effector, so you don’t need an accurate dynamics. This is just as well, because we probably can’t get an accurate dynamics for a flexible kinematic chain. However, the rich feedback such a chain can provide can be the basis for guiding motions by feedback, by interaction with ongoing unpredictable events, rather then by rigid command (of position or of forces). Understanding this in the case where accurate positioning is not needed might eventually to understanding how to do accurate control with flexible arms as well.

The first hard robotics problem in a dancing robot would be balance: can you keep it from falling over? Raibert↗︎︎ has had trouble enough getting robots to run; why should we expect to be able to make one that can dance? Perhaps we can learn enough from his work to do more. But we could also finesse it by attaching the body to a rigid stand. This wouldn’t compromise the motivations of the project I explained in the first section (“why build a dancing robot?”).

Learning

I believe (following in particular the Soviet activity theory↗︎︎ school, and much other psychological and sociological research) that learning by apprenticeship is crucial to cognition generally. The project I’m outlining here is a good opportunity to make computational studies of such learning.

I am thinking in particular of the possibility of learning by imitating particular gestures. A dancer has a vocabulary of moves with which she communicates. Dancing with someone, you may see her do something you haven’t done before. You may imitate it, if you can, to see how it feels. Probably the first few times you make that move it doesn’t really come out right. This is probably because your kinesthetic perception doesn’t build accurate models of the other’s motions (because it doesn’t need to) and because you couldn’t accurately imitate it anyway (because you can’t command your limbs to accurately conform to even an accurately represented motion pattern, because you don’t need to be able to). However, each time you try to imitate a gesture, you do it a bit better. You get feedback by seeing what happens and how it feels (and perhaps looks, to the extent that you can watch yourself dance). (Chris Atkeson’s work is relevant here.)1

I believe that the transmission of culture depends crucially on the apprentice being similar to her mentor. Computers can’t be intelligent not only because they don’t have bodies, but because they don’t have human bodies. Before a computer can learn anything useful, it has to be able to act human enough that people will accept it as human for the relevant purposes. (The “framing” processes by which this works are explained in Kenneth Kaye’s brilliant and relevant book The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Can Create Persons↗︎︎.) Dancing is a task circumscribed enough that it may be possible to build a robot good enough that people will enjoy dancing with it and so treat it as human for dancing purposes and so enable it to learn.

It’s hard for people to learn to dance. Why should it be easy for the robot? Perhaps there’s a “superhuman human” fantasy here. I’d like to learn more about the process of learning to dance: what makes it difficult for people.

Scope and limitations

Is this project feasible? I don’t know. It’s certainly very ambitious. It may be feasible, but not for me; my attention span is about a year, and this is five-to-ten year project. I’m passionate enough about it at the moment that I intend to learn more about what’s needed. It may also be feasible, but only at one of a very few places; plausibly only MIT has the resources to make it possible, if indeed anywhere does.

Taking dancing out of context necessarily does violence to it. Anything less than building a complete person is always going to involve terrible compromises. For example, much of what you do on the dance floor is to make motions reminiscent of specific motions that have significances in other activities, so that you draw on your experience in the rest of life. A robot won’t have that experience to draw on.

The fact that there’s no “right” way to dance makes evaluation difficult.

If dancing is too hard, an easier task would be to build a robot with one or two arms and optionally a head which can imitate gestures.2 This factors out the balance issue and a lot of the mechanical problems, because you can use external motors with tendon drive. It’s a much less interesting task, but perhaps one that illustrates enough of the relevant issues while being tractable.

  • 1. Rereading this in 2016, I have zero memory of what Chris↗︎︎ had done by 1990, and haven’t been able to locate it easily. I’m not sure how much my proposal was influenced by his work. However, it turns out that he has recently started working on soft humanoid robots↗︎︎, along lines generally similar to what I wrote here! Check out “What's Next For Humanoid Robotics?↗︎︎”, a seriously cool Powerpoint presentation.
  • 2. The Cog Project↗︎︎ did precisely this. I suspect that it was influenced by “Robots That Dance”; no one else had previously suggested anything similar as far as I know. I never got around to asking Rod Brooks (my PhD advisor and subsequently PI of the Cog Project), so I’m not sure.

Comments on “The Court of Values and the Bureau of Boringness”

Metablog

Judging whether a system applies

Supposedly President Washington’s First Inauguration
George Washington’s First Presidential Inauguration.

George Washington was the first President of the United States. This is true, and we know it is true.

How is it true, and how do we know?

Here are ten quite different ways you could argue it is not true, or that we don’t really know:

  1. One should never hold any belief with absolute certainty. We can say that “George Washington was the first President” is probably true, and we can use evidence to calculate that probability. However, it’s misleading and meaningless—or outright wrong—to claim that it’s simply “true.” One can only ever say “given such-and-such observations, the probability that Washington was the first President is 0.99” (or whatever the correct number is). If you are too lazy to do the math, then at the absolute minimum you must always explicitly acknowledge “this is probably true, but it could be false, too.”

  2. The first President was John Adams, and no one questioned that at the time. In the 1830s, there was massive rewriting of history to justify Andrew Jackson’s coup against the Adams Dynasty. That was so successful that only a few historians—now dismissed as cranks—know the truth.

  3. “Presidency” is an essentialist delusion. There is no set of objective features that correspond to “being President.” If you dissected Barack Obama, you could not find his supposed “President-ness” anywhere. The same would have been true of Washington. This is not merely a limitation in our knowledge; “Presidency” simply isn’t a physical property of some people. There’s no separate non-physical reality, so there’s no such thing as a “President.”

  4. “Presidency” is a subjectivist delusion. It’s an objective fact that almost everyone believes Washington was the first American President. When we know more neuroscience, we’ll be able to find those beliefs with brain scans. But mere collective belief can’t make something exist; nearly everyone used to believe in ghosts.

  5. Washington was the second President. You cannot step in the same river twice: because the river is never the same again, but more importantly because you are never the same person again. Likewise, you cannot elect the same person President twice. The first President (1789–1793) was also named “George Washington,” but he had not yet evolved into his final form. The true George Washington was President from 1793–1797.

  6. George Washington no longer exists. Anything you say about a non-existent object is necessarily meaningless, not true or false. You might as well make claims about colorless green ideas.

  7. “The United States” does not refer to a solid, distinct, changeless, clear, well-defined entity. The term is necessarily unclear in some ways, and the thing itself is necessarily somewhat nebulous↗︎︎. The phrase certainly meant something quite different in the 1700s than it does now. We cannot make durable, definite claims about fluid, indefinite entities.

  8. Due to technical irregularities, Washington was not elected in full compliance with Constitutional procedures. Although he acted as if he were President, and everyone regarded him as President at the time, he actually wasn’t. The true first President, elected in full conformity with Constitutional requirements, was John Adams.

  9. Although Washington was the first President de jure, William Howe↗︎︎ earlier exerted sufficient authority throughout Anglophone America that he ought to be recognized as the first President de facto.

  10. The Revolutionary War was an illegitimate rebellion against a legitimate government, and so cannot have established a genuine state. The British Crown remains the legitimate government of North America, and “The United States” is a propaganda fiction. America has never had a “President.”

Getting meta-systematic cognition wrong—and right

All these objections are silly and wrong.1 How and why?

Each uses some system of reasoning that, while sometimes valid and helpful, is worse than useless in this case. There’s nothing wrong with any of the systems; they are just wrong ones to apply here.

Judging whether or not a system applies is the simplest form of meta-systematic reasoning. Meta-systematic reasoning is the cognitive aspect of Kegan’s “stage 5”↗︎︎, the fluid mode, or the complete stance↗︎︎. (These are different terms for more-or-less the same thing.) I have suggested that broader understanding of meta-systematicity is currently critical to the survival of civilization, so I plan to be helpful by saying more about it. This post is a starting point—beginning with the simplest manifestation.

My hope is that the ridiculous examples start to give a sense of what “meta-systematicity” means. Eventually I hope to say much more, across many web pages. For now, perhaps some readers can extrapolate to other aspects of meta-systematicity, or even to the whole thing.

(Some other forms of meta-systematic cognition are figuring out how to apply a system in a concrete situation; combining systems, or parts of them; and creating new systems. Also: systems generally apply more-or-less well, and never quite perfectly, so the judgement is of whether a system applies well enough. For clarity and simplicity, in this post I analyze atypically silly examples in which a system fails to apply at all, or is drastically mis-applied, so the judgement can be quite definite.)

Judging is neither determining nor intuiting

“Judging” is a careful choice of word: it is neither “determining” nor “intuiting.” “Determining” would be systematic, and “intuiting” would be anti-rational.

  • Some systems come with systematic criteria for whether they apply. For instance, some programming languages can handle parallel processing, and some can’t. In such cases, we can definitively determine whether a system applies, using systematic rationality. Although that is reasoning about a system, it is not “meta-systematic,” in the sense I use the term. “Meta-systematic” means using systems in ways that are not themselves systematic.

  • Meta-systematic judgement is not some sort of Romantic intuition, mystical insight, or super-Turing woo. Often, it is easy. I made the ten objections deliberately ridiculous to show how obvious and down-to-earth it can be. Meta-systematic cognition does not reject either common sense or systematic rationality. In fact, it depends on both.

While it is easy to explain why each of the ten objections mis-uses a system, the reason each is silly is specific to it, and to Washington’s Presidency. The form of each objection is valid when applied to other claims. None of the objections is formally illogical. None is irrational according to any systematic theory of rationality.

What is hard is to say in general when a system of reasoning is applicable. Judging applicability is human-complete, in fact. By that, I mean that there is no aspect of human beingness that is not potentially relevant. (I do not mean that humans are somehow special, so that we can resolve questions of judgement by magic.)

Judgement cannot be reduced to any algorithm, or set of determinate criteria.2 In general, there is no end to the kinds of evidence and kinds of reasoning that might go into a judgement. Each has to be evaluated on its own, idiosyncratic merits. In many cases, this means that a judgement cannot be made, or can only be tentative. In others—such as the question of whether Washington was the first American President—a judgement can be quite certain.

This implies that epistemology is also human-complete. There can be no systematic “scientific method.” The best we can get is meta-systematic judgement among alternative lines of investigation.

That is a larger claim than I can justify in a blog post. However, I hope this post will help you see why it might be true.

Analyzing ten meta-systematic failures

The rest of this post goes through each of the ten objections and:

  • explains what system is being misapplied;
  • explains that it’s a perfectly sensible system that is often useful;
  • explains why it doesn’t apply to Washington’s Presidency;
  • begins to explain why its range of applicability cannot be specified systematically.

I won’t attempt to prove that any of these systems lacks systematic applicability criteria. An argument about that could be unboundedly complex and difficult—precisely because it’s meta-systematic, and therefore human-complete.

My discussions of applicability will be brief and vague; this post is quite long even so. For some of the systems, the analysis may still get more technical than you want to read. In that case, it’s safe to skip ahead to the next.

Among the ten objections, the first two are epistemological: they claim we have inadequate evidence to know that Washington was the first American President. The rest are ontological, concerning the fundamental nature of things. Objections 3 and 4 challenge the reality of meaningness: is there even any fact-of-the-matter about who the President was? The next three point out the fundamental nebulosity↗︎︎ of all objects. And the last three rely on the nebulosity of social institutions specifically.

Bayesianism

Neon sign advertising Bayes’ Theorem
Neon sign advertising Bayes’ Theorem; photo courtesy↗︎︎ mattbuck

One should never hold any belief with absolute certainty. We can say that “George Washington was the first President” is probably true, and we can use evidence to calculate that probability. However, it’s misleading and meaningless—or outright wrong—to claim that it’s simply “true.” One can only ever say “given such-and-such observations, the probability that Washington was the first President is 0.99” (or whatever the correct number is). If you are too lazy to do the math, then at the absolute minimum you must always explicitly acknowledge “this is probably true, but it could be false, too.”

This is a misapplication of probabilistic reasoning.

Probability theory is one of the most valuable systems of formal rationality. It is central in many fields of science, engineering, medicine, economics, business strategy, and public policy analysis. Everyone should learn the basics of probabilistic reasoning in high school.

Probability theory is also completely useless in most everyday situations, and also in many fields of science, engineering, and so on. In the case of Washington’s Presidency, attempting to compute a probability would be completely meaningless. Also, it is so close to 1.0 that even if it could be computed accurately, it wouldn’t be useful. Most of the time, trying to reason probabilistically is dumb.

Under what circumstances is probability theory useful?

Some things—like Washingon’s Presidency—are too certain. Most things are too uncertain. I started laying the groundwork for a broad analysis of “too uncertain” in “Probability, knowledge, and meta-probability↗︎︎” and “Probability and radical uncertainty↗︎︎,” but unfortunately haven’t gotten around to finishing that sequence of posts.3

Applicability can’t just be reduced to a restricted range of degrees of certainty, however. In “How To Think Real Good,” I suggested that there are many different kinds of uncertainty. Any particular situation typically involves several, some more amenable to probabilistic modeling than others. This makes questions of whether and how to apply probability theory complex.

I have a draft post on judging when probability theory will work. (This might help un-stick those who want to believe it’s always the answer to everything.) What features of a situation allow you to assign meaningful probability estimates? There are many heuristic considerations that can go into that judgement. Recognizing these can be valuable in practice. On the other hand, they are necessarily vague, domain-dependent, and unbounded. (Nebulous↗︎︎, in other words.) There can be no precise, general, systematic answer.

A recent satire of Bayesianism↗︎︎ turns on this unboundedness. Applying probability theory requires circumscribing the hypothesis space (as I explained in “How To Think Real Good”), and there is no systematic way to do that.

Historical fabrication and revisionism

George Washington’s false teeth
George Washington’s false teeth

The first President was John Adams, and no one questioned that at the time. In the 1830s, there was massive rewriting of history to justify Andrew Jackson’s coup against the Adams Dynasty. That was so successful that only a few historians—now dismissed as cranks—know the truth.

It’s widely known that Washington wore false teeth, made of wood. This is false↗︎︎; none of his dentures were made of wood.

It is also widely known that the story about young George and the cherry tree is a myth. The fable was generally accepted as fact during the 1830s, however. Even now, it is not widely known that it was fabricated by a historian↗︎︎, in 1806, to promote a particular political program.

It is widely known that Buddhism is the religion taught by the historical Buddha, named Siddhartha Gautama, who lived about 2500 years ago. This is false. There is no good historical evidence↗︎︎ of Gautama’s existence. If he did exist, there is insufficient evidence to determine what he taught. We do know for sure that most of Buddhism was not taught by him, because it can be reliably dated to much later eras. Most of “Buddhist history” has been shown by recent mainstream scholarship to have been fabricated, in various centuries after the supposed events, to justify then-current political movements.

This is closely parallel to the claim that Washington’s Presidency was fabricated to erase from history the Adams family↗︎︎’s hereditary monarchy. It’s just that Gautama’s teaching was invented later, and Washington’s Presidency wasn’t. How do we know?

Some details of what mainstream experts currently believe about Washington may be wrong, because they have mistakenly accepted evidence from fabricated historical documents. I hope you will agree, though, that it is not meaningfully possible that his entire Presidency was fabricated. How do we know?

There’s two questions here, actually: how do historians know, and how do we know that they know? This is an instance of socially distributed knowledge. We do know Washington’s Presidency couldn’t have been fabricated, but we know that only in dependence on a community of experts. No single historian knows independently, either; each of them depends on the rest.

Professional historians use a wide variety of technical methods for evaluating different kinds of evidence, and coming to conclusions based on them. All these methods involve judgement, however. You cannot systematically assign a numerical “strength of evidence” to a hand-written letter signed “Geo. Wash.”, a painting of the First Inauguration, and a 1794 newspaper article, add it up and declare “p<0.05: we know.” There is no end to the considerations that might be relevant to whether any such things may have been faked. In some cases—including this one—rational certainty can be reached, however.

(By the way, the painting at the head of this page is supposedly of Washington’s First Inauguration in 1789. It hangs on the wall in Federal Hall. However, reliable-sounding sources suggest it was painted a century later, in 1889, by one Ramón de Elorriaga. Other reliable-sounding sources suggest that this attribution is dubious, so maybe no one knows where the painting came from. Based on a casual web search, it seems that there is no surviving depiction of either of Washington’s Inaugurations that was created within his lifetime. I’m not sure, though!)

The question of how we know the experts know is still more nebulous—although no less certain. Entire professions full of mainstream experts can be totally wrong, as in the case of nutrition. I personally know almost nothing about what sort of evidence for Washington’s Presidency is available for professional historians. Instead, my judgement is that if there were any meaningful chance that they were wrong, I would know about it. It is hard to say what that judgement rests on, though!

Essentialism and inherent (or objective) meanings

Vesalius brain dissection

“Presidency” is an essentialist delusion. There is no set of objective features that correspond to “being President.” If you dissected Barack Obama, you could not find his supposed “President-ness” anywhere. The same would have been true of Washington. This is not merely a limitation in our knowledge; “Presidency” simply isn’t a physical property of some people. There’s no separate non-physical reality, so there’s no such thing as a “President.”

Essentialism↗︎︎ is a ubiquitous metaphysical error. It features in theories according to which meanings are objective, or inherent in the things that have the meaning. It is closely related to eternalism↗︎︎, and is harmful for many of the same reasons.

One current manifestation is the increasingly acrimonious debate over whether trans people are male or female. Most participants, on both sides, agree that trans people are inherently, objectively, essentially one sex or the other. They only disagree about which sex that is, and what the criteria are for determining this objective truth! This seems plainly wrong to me. Sex (like everything) is somewhat nebulous. There are irreducible gray areas. Insisting that there is a clear-cut objective fact about whether some people are male or female is politically-motivated metaphysical nonsense.

On the other hand, vacuum cleaners do objectively, inherently suck. If you disassemble one you can see how and why. And in most cases, it’s clear what sex someone is, in ways that depend largely on physical facts, not social agreements. However, there is no sharp boundary between the gray areas and the clear-cut cases. One might say that “transness” is a matter of degree, and continuously graded; but even that would be a gross oversimplification.

Back to Presidency. The “dissection” objection is quite right that it is not an objective, inherent property of a person. This is an important point. I will make a similar argument in “A billion tiny spooks,” against the claim that knowledge is an objective, inherent property of a person. The representational theory of mind says that my knowing Washington was the first President consists of having that written down in my brain somewhere. This can’t be true, partly because (as I wrote above) that knowledge is socially distributed.

But then what? The following objection points out, also correctly, that Presidency is not a matter of subjective agreement. If Presidency is neither objective nor subjective, that might seem to cover all bases. And if it is not a property of an individual, nor a social agreement, what sort of a thing could it be? Should we conclude that it does not exist?

One could say that “Presidency” exists “in the domain of meanings”—although that is also misleading. The book will eventually explain how meanings can be neither objective nor subjective, but real just the same. They are also not non-physical, or “mental.” They are non-local interactional dynamics.

The subjective theory of meaning

Glee club
Glee photo courtesy↗︎︎ Keith McDuffee

“Presidency” is a subjectivist delusion. It’s an objective fact that almost everyone believes Washington was the first American President. When we know more neuroscience, we’ll be able to find those beliefs with brain scans. But mere collective belief can’t make something exist; nearly everyone used to believe in ghosts.

When the objective, correspondence theory of truth started to break down↗︎︎, philosophers advocated various alternatives. One was the consensus theory, that truth is simply a matter of agreement. In the case of physical facts, this is obviously idiotic. (Although some “spiritual” people do still apply it.)

In the domain of meanings, the consensus theory is also wrong, but less obviously so. It is common for otherwise-intelligent people to explain social institutions as “collective hallucinations.” A hallucination means a mistaken perception of something that is not really↗︎︎ there. But are we mistaken to believe that there is such a thing as a President? Clearly not.

Nevertheless, the objection is right that everyone believing someone is President does not make him so. Let’s say John Adams XIV, the popular Party Planner of the college Glee Club, was voted in as President of the Club. Naturally, everyone (including John XIV) believed he was President. A few months later, the Treasurer discovered that, in XIV’s former Party Planner role, he had been skimming cash from the amounts entrusted to him for beverage purchase. Clearly he had to be removed as President, but no one knew off-hand what the official way to do this was. Someone remembered that the Club had an ancient set of bylaws, which no one had looked at in years. Reading through them carefully, the Club’s other officers discovered that the section on elections stated that the winner of an election was the person who got the most votes, unless they had committed “moral turpitude in respect of the purposes of the Club.” Embezzlement is mentioned as an instance of “moral turpitude.” Under the wording of the bylaws, it’s irrelevant to the election outcome whether anyone knew about it—only that it had happened. Thus, XIV had never been President—even though everyone had thought he was.

Beliefs play important roles in most meanings, and most social institutions. However, they don’t fully constitute either. The roles beliefs do play are generally complex, nebulous, and not understandable in systematic terms.

Transtemporal identity

Heraclitus
Heraclitus kept his feet dry in a damn fine pair of boots

Washington was the second President. You cannot step in the same river twice: because the river is never the same again, but more importantly because you are never the same person again. Likewise, you cannot elect the same person President twice. The first President (1789–1793) was also named “George Washington,” but he had not yet evolved into his final form↗︎︎. The true George Washington was President from 1793–1797.

“The same river” is a theme of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who emphasized constant change. Famously, he said “πάντα ῥεῖ”: everything flows. But what he said about the river was more complicated than usually remembered:

Ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.

We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.4

When has something changed enough that it is no longer the same thing? This is the problem of transtemporal identity↗︎︎. Another ancient Greek formulation is “the ship of Theseus.” Suppose that, as a result of a series of repairs, every board in the boat is eventually replaced; is it still the same one? Suppose the ship’s carpenter saved all the worn boards and later assembled them into the same form as the original ship (albeit rather beaten-up-looking). Would that be the same boat? It is and it is not.

There can be no general, systematic, or definite answer. There is no fact-of-the-matter about whether the Truckee River is the same river today as when I stepped in it last week. There is no fact-of-the-matter about whether I am “the same person” today as when I stepped in it last week, or when I first did decades ago. Same in what way?

Nevertheless, we can often make judgements about whether something is the same thing for particular purposes. Although no systematic criteria apply, we can say quite firmly that it’s silly to claim that the President of 1789 was not the same person as the President of 1793.

Positivism

Washington's Tomb
Who is buried in Washington's Tomb↗︎︎? (Hint: not Washington.) Photo courtesy↗︎︎ Rebel At

George Washington no longer exists. Anything you say about a non-existent object is necessarily meaningless, not true or false. You might as well make claims about colorless green ideas.

“Positivism” is a vague term. It is often described as “the rejection of metaphysics.” The general idea is that we can gain knowledge only from sense data (observations and measurements) and from reasoning about those data. The main motivation was to reject religious claims about non-existent objects such as God, souls, and Heaven. In general, this is sensible and right. You might as well say “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as “the Holy Ghost proceeds from God the Father.” Both are meaningless—in some sense—because they refer to objects that we can’t observe and therefore don’t exist.

However, no one has been able to make positivism into a coherent system. The logical positivism of the early 20th century said all statements were unambiguously true, false, or meaningless, and ones about non-existent objects were definitely in the third category. This makes sense, but fails on some examples.

George Washington does not exist—not in 2016. We cannot observe or measure him. Accordingly, some positivists backed themselves into the corner where they were forced to say that statements about past objects are meaningless. This, obviously, is silly—but it’s hard to explain precisely why.

I said that none of the ten objections were formally irrational. Might this one be an exception? There is no logical fallacy, but one could reasonably argue that a metaphysics of transtemporal predication must be part of any general theory of rationality. On the other hand, I don’t know of any credible account. (Dealing with the problem of transtemporal identity would be only one of several difficulties.)

In fact, we don’t have any general theory of rationality. Logical positivism was the last serious attempt to develop one. By the 1960s, it had unambiguously failed, for several reasons, any one of which would have been fatal.

BMX jump
Young Gandalf catching some air. Photo courtesy↗︎︎ Llann Wé

There is another slippery slope here. George Washington does not exist, but it is straightforwardly true to say that he was the President. Gandalf does not exist, but it is true—in some sense—to say he was a wizard.5 This is a meaningful sense, because it is definitely false to say he was a BMX freestyle rider. That we can make definitely false statements about Gandalf does imply we can make meaningfully true ones too. Unfortunately, this suggests “the Holy Ghost proceeds from mayonnaise” is definitely false, which suggests that “the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father” is also true in some sense. Unfortunately, we cannot exorcize spooks just by declaring all statements about them meaningless. On the other hand, “the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father” is definitely silly↗︎︎.

Much as we might like to, we can’t eliminate metaphysical considerations from judgements of system applicability. And those get complex and ambiguous fast—even in as mundane an activity as making breakfast.

The nebulosity of institutions

Map of the United States as of Washington’s Inauguration
Map of the United States as of Washington’s Inauguration, courtesy↗︎︎ Wikimedia

“The United States” does not refer to a solid, distinct, changeless, clear, well-defined entity. The term is necessarily unclear in some ways, and the thing itself is necessarily somewhat nebulous↗︎︎. The phrase certainly meant something quite different in the 1700s than it does now. We cannot make durable, definite claims about fluid, indefinite entities.

This is a misapplication of the nebulosity-and-pattern framework described in Meaningness!

According to that framework, nothing, even a steel ball, is perfectly solid, distinct, changeless, clear, or well-defined.6 Much less so a country. The United States is unquestionably intangible, fuzzy, changeable, vague, and ambiguous.

In fact, the ontological status of a state is deeply mysterious. We think we know what sort of thing a steel ball is: a “macroscopic physical object.” What that means is more mysterious than you might suppose, but at least we have a word for it.

What is a country? Maybe it is a “social institution,” which somehow lives in the intangible realm of meanings. But a country also has a geographic extent, unlike institutions such as a glee club. That geographic extent, nevertheless, is somewhat vague. As you can see from the map above, the boundaries of the United States were unclear in 1789, and have changed frequently since. Even now, its boundaries are disputed, and there are many places that are part of the United States for certain purposes and not for others. Puerto Rico and Guantanamo Bay are two quite different examples.

The transtemporal identity of countries is even vaguer than that of rivers or people. China, like the ship of Theseus, was disassembled in its 1949 Civil War, and the pieces reassembled into the Republic of China (“Taiwan”) and the People’s Republic of China, which may or may not be two different countries, either or both of which may or may not be the same country that existed before 1949.

For those of a positivistic bent—and I include myself in that category—it’s tempting to throw up our hands and say “states are collective hallucinations; they are metaphysical spooks; they don’t really exist.” But this is nihilism↗︎︎, the denial↗︎︎ of meanings that are plainly evident. Denying the existence of the United States is silly.

“We cannot make durable, definite claims about fluid, indefinite entities” is often importantly true. Social justice is a standard example. It is not meaningless and not non-existent, but it is highly nebulous. Claiming that social justice has unchanging and absolute implications is a common move in current political discourse, but it is usually silly. It is a form of eternalism↗︎︎, and specifically the eternalist ploy of imposing fixed meanings. That is harmful.

Granting the existence of the United States, and granting that it is fluid and indefinite, can we make durable and definite claims about it? Yes. “Washington was the first American President” is a durable claim: it will still be true in a thousand years, even if the United States has ceased to exist. It is a definite claim: it was George Washington who was President, not Martha Washington, and not George William Frederick.

So when can we make durable, definite claims about fluid, indefinite entities, and when can we not? That is a matter of judgement, and unbounded considerations may be relevant.

Strict constructionism

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams

Due to technical irregularities, Washington was not elected in full compliance with Constitutional procedures. Although he acted as if he were President, and everyone regarded him as President at the time, he actually wasn’t. The true first President, elected in full conformity with Constitutional requirements, was John Adams.

This is probably factually false; I just invented technical irregularities in Washington’s election.7 That’s not its main problem, though. It’s a misapplication of strict constructionism↗︎︎, the idea that the only thing that counts is what the Constitution says. If there had been a minor procedural glitch in Washington’s election, it wouldn’t matter. But there are many cases in which technicalities do count. Discovering them may reverse the result of an election that had been thought settled—as in the case of John Adams XIV.8

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first advocates of strict constructionism. His Republican Party↗︎︎ opposed the growing power of the national government, and supported state’s rights. The Constitution says↗︎︎ that:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Jefferson argued that it meant what it said, and the United States could not do anything the Constitution did not specifically say it could. His former friend John Adams, a Federalist, argued that the Constitution implied powers↗︎︎ it didn’t expressly mention.

Both positions are reasonable, but seem incompatible. The bitter election of 1800↗︎︎ pitted the two men against each other as candidates for President—and their Constitutional interpretation philosophies against each other as candidates for the national political ideology. This election was marked by multiple technical irregularities. It was also perhaps the most divisive in American history. Jefferson feared that Adams intended to found a hereditary monarchy; Adams feared that Jefferson intended to break up the Union. Both may have been right.

Strictly strict constructionism is actually impossible.9 Laws are not like computer programs, which causally engender exactly the computations they describe. There is no such thing as an entirely literal and context-free meaning of a text; human languages doesn’t work that way. Applying anything written in a human language always, necessarily, requires interpretive judgement in a concrete situation. Interpretation always, necessarily, depends on unbounded considerations, and so cannot be reduced to a system.

Nevertheless, some legal interpretations are more literal, and others more contextual. In practice, courts have to steer between the Scylla of literalist myopia and the Charybdis of judicial activism.

So, when do electoral technicalities count? Why should we apply a “strict” standard to John Adams XIV and a “contextual” one to George Washington?

This is a judgement, for which an unbounded set of considerations may apply. There can be no systematic answer; one can only say that most of the considerations, or the stronger considerations, point one way or the other. Here are a few, offhand, in this case:

  • The Electoral College’s vote was unanimous both times Washington was elected. If a procedural error had been found and the vote repeated, we can be reasonably certain Washington would have won again. We can be reasonably sure that if a new vote were held, John Adams XIV would lose. In neither case is there any legal basis for a re-vote, but the outcome of the thought experiment is a relevant consideration.

  • The system under which Washington was elected was brand new, and unlike anything that had been tried elsewhere.10 Complicated new systems inevitably have minor bugs, which get ironed out quickly with experience. In a new system, the designers’ intent matters more than texts or precedent. There is no question that the writers of the Constitution wanted Washington as President. On the other hand, in a long-standing system that is known to work generally well, stability is more important than the designers’ intent, which may be forgotten or irrelevant to new conditions. The Glee Club bylaws were “ancient” and also were probably similar to those of similar organizations; they can be assumed to have been mainly debugged and therefore functional.

  • The stakes were much higher in Washington’s case than John XIV’s. Doubts about whether Washington was actually President could easily have torn the Union apart. (Consequences count.) Washington acting as President of the United States (whether he “really↗︎︎” was or not) was enormously significant; XIV acting as President of the Glee Club was not.

  • Indeed, Washington in part defined what it means to be an American President, by example. He was elected to an office whose nature was only vaguely specified in the Constitution. The Electoral College mostly just wanted him in charge; they elected a person, not an official.

None of these is a strong argument; but taken together, I think the case is reasonably clear.

(Before we move on: the story of Adams and Jefferson’s friendship, their subsequent enmity, and their eventual reconciliation is fascinating. Here↗︎︎ is a brief account. The two men both died on July 4th, 1826, fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence that they co-wrote. This must mean something↗︎︎.)

De jure and de facto

General William Howe
The Right Honorable Viscount General Sir William Howe

Although Washington was the first President de jure, William Howe↗︎︎ earlier exerted sufficient authority throughout Anglophone America that he ought to be recognized as the first President de facto.

The de jure/de facto distinction is key to understanding systematic social institutions. A non-systematic institution (such as a hunter-gatherer band) has no de jure aspect; a systematic one does, by definition. However, every systematic institution also has a de facto aspect, which is more or less discordant with the de jure one. The relationship between the two is always nebulous: complex, variable, and ambiguous.

To understand a systematic social institution, you have to analyze both aspects, plus their relationship. It is often true, though, that the de facto aspect is the one that primarily matters. For example, the de jure Constitution of Syria↗︎︎ states that “The political system is based on the principle of political pluralism, and rule is only obtained and exercised democratically through voting,” but the facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

It is not uncommon for someone to be President de facto but not de jure, for any of several reasons. For instance, if the de jure President is non-functional, but it would be inconvenient to remove them from office de jure, someone else may do the job de facto. Some mainstream historians consider Edith Wilson↗︎︎ to have been the de facto President of the United States for a year and a half, after her husband Woodrow’s incapacitating stroke.

Another common reason is that the supposed country of which someone is de facto President is new, and only a de facto entity itself. Leonid Tibilov is currently described↗︎︎ as the “de facto President of South Ossetia” because South Ossetia is only a “partially recognized state.” De jure, it is nebulous whether South Ossetia even exists, and de facto it is nebulous whether it is a genuine state or a Russian puppet. However, Tibilov exerts sufficient authority throughout the territory of the supposed state that he ought to be recognized as the de facto President.

Similarly, perhaps, William Howe? He was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in America from 1775 to 1778. It is nebulous whether the United States existed then either de jure or de facto. However, Howe was the most powerful man in America for much of the period. Should he be considered de facto President?

No, that would be silly. But why? You will now be unsurprised to hear that this is “a matter of judgement, with unbounded considerations that may be relevant.” Here are some:

  • The American President is head of government, and subordinate to no one other than the citizens collectively. Howe was several levels down in the British military chain of command, which was in turn subordinate to Parliament and the King.

  • Although the American President is Commander-in-Chief, the Presidency is primarily a civil, not military, office. Howe made no attempt to run a civil government; his activity was purely military.

  • Britain, and so Howe, did not recognize a unified political entity in North America, only a collection of colonies. Howe couldn’t hold an office, even de facto, in an entity that neither he nor his superiors considered to exit.

  • The term “President” was rarely, if ever, applied to heads of governments before the office was created by the United States Constitutional Convention, a decade after Howe left. Calling him “President” would be anachronistic. If Howe were considered de facto head of an American government, he should be called a “Prince” or “Governor” or something.

“Left as an exercise for the reader”

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis
The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis↗︎︎, which effectively ended the Revolutionary War

The Revolutionary War was an illegitimate rebellion against a legitimate government, and so cannot have established a genuine state. The British Crown remains the legitimate government of North America, and “The United States” is a propaganda fiction. America has never had a “President.”

This is the last of the ten objections. At this point, the pattern of analysis should be clear. If you’ve followed the story so far, you can probably work this one out yourself!

  • 1. They are also fun; it’s tempting to add to the list. Maybe you’d like to do that in the comments?
  • 2. You might object that every human, being a bounded volume of spacetime, is fully described by physical laws, and therefore algorithmic and systematic. This is arguably true, but not in an interesting or relevant sense. This post does not explain what I mean by a “system,” because that would be a long story. Roughly, I mean something humans can reason with. A particle-level specification of a macroscopic quantity of matter is not that. An algorithm, by some definitions, is “an effective procedure.” An “algorithm” that consists of a Unified Theory of fundamental physics plus the quantum state of a person is not meaningfully effective, even if it fits the mathematical definition.
  • 3. Partly because LessWrong imploded. Maybe I should finish them here?
  • 4. I suspect it is not by coincidence that this sounds like Nagarjuna, and like Zhuangzi.
  • 5. The sense in which “Gandalf was a wizard” is true is not particularly mysterious. Presumably it’s possible to patch positivism to handle this case. I’m not trying to disprove positivism here, only to use “all statements about Washington are meaningless” as an obvious example of mis-applying the system.
  • 6. These five characteristics are the fixations↗︎︎ of the five aspects of form (pattern↗︎︎) according to Vajrayana Buddhism↗︎︎. I’ve alluded to the Buddhist framework for historical and humorous reasons only. The five-fold structure is a surprisingly useful heuristic, but is not seriously included in the Meaningness analysis of nebulosity and pattern.
  • 7. I don’t know that there weren’t any, though. It wouldn’t surprise me if some are well-known to historians. It also wouldn’t surprise me if the process was so poorly documented that no one knows if there were any or not. I haven’t bothered to look into this, because (as I will explain) it doesn’t matter.
  • 8. There’s an entertaining, although silly, argument that David Rice Atchison was President for one day↗︎︎ in 1894, due to a procedural glitch.
  • 9. And “strict constructionism” is not well-defined itself. It’s related, in ill-defined ways, to several similar ideas: textualism, originalism, and judicial restraint. None of those is well-defined either. These are important and useful concepts nonetheless.
  • 10. With the interesting, but dubious, possible exception of the Iroquois Constitution↗︎︎.

Reasons to be cheerless, part 3

For the nihilism section of the book, I’m collecting reasons to think everything is meaningless. I’m hoping to get a complete set, so I can address them comprehensively.

Can you help?

Oddly, I haven’t been able to find any discussion of nihilism that covers many reasons, or even any that argues seriously for any of them. Generally, they say something like “after we’re all dead, nothing will be meaningful, therefore nihilism,” which doesn’t actually follow.

Can you recommend books/articles/blog posts that make good arguments for nihilism?

Which of the following reasons do you find most convincing, and why?

Are there reasons to think everything is meaningless that I’ve missed in this list?

Please leave a comment!

  1. Sure, some things have a mundane, trivial “meaning,” but nothing is really meaningful.
  2. Some things have some finite meaning, but nothing is ultimately meaningful.
  3. Some things (food, sex, survival) obviously have materialistic meanings to us as animals; but “higher” meanings are pious fantasies or lies.
  4. Nothing is inherently meaningful. Objects don’t have meanings inside them, as essences; physics doesn’t support that.
  5. Nothing is objectively meaningful. Finding things meaningful is a subjective, mental process, so it’s arbitrary and the meanings aren’t real.
  6. Subjective “meanings” are relative to the observer. There’s no way to resolve disagreements about them, so they aren’t good for anything.
  7. Space aliens might have completely different ideas about what counts as meaningful, which shows nothing is really meaningful at all.
  8. You can’t prove anything is actually meaningful.
  9. Nothing is absolutely meaningful. All supposed meanings are merely relative, so they don’t count.
  10. Nothing is eternally meaningful. All meanings are transient and will be obliterated by time, so they don’t count.
  11. After you are dead, whatever you found meaningful is lost, so it won’t be meaningful any more. What good is your life then?
  12. After everyone is dead, and the sun explodes and the human race goes extinct, nothing will be meaningful to anyone.
  13. Some things falsely seem meaningful, but when viewed from the perspective of the universe as a whole, they are revealed to be meaningless.
  14. Some things in life—its contents—seem meaningful; but looking at your life as a whole, you realize they don’t add up, and it’s meaningless.
  15. When you think about why things seem meaningful, in the final analysis, you realize they aren’t meaningful after all.
  16. To see what is really meaningful, you’d have to stand outside the universe, like God. But there is no God, and we can’t do that.
  17. Subatomic particles have no meaning, and everything is made of subatomic particles, and nothing adds meaning to them, so there’s no meaning.
  18. Everyone used to believe in spirits, but we couldn’t measure them, and we now know they don’t exist. Same for meanings.
  19. Meanings would have to be made of some non-material substance, but there’s strong evidence nothing like that exists.
  20. Meanings would imply mind/body dualism, which we know is wrong. Science shows that consciousness is just a neurochemical process.
  21. There’s no credible theory that explains how meaning could actually work.
  22. We know how “meaning” works—it’s just produced by neurons—so it doesn’t actually exist.
  23. We hallucinate meaning as a result of the evolution of the brain, but evolution is a random, meaningless process, so meaning is illusory.
  24. There was no meaning in the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, and there’s no process that adds meaning, so there’s no meaning now.
  25. You can’t prove anything is worth living for. Life is mostly suffering, and has no real value.
  26. Meanings are just made-up, like stories. They’re not real.
  27. Sure, you could choose to label some things “meaningful,” but that doesn’t mean anything. You could call some things “yixxy” too.
  28. You can’t define “meaning,” so it doesn’t exist.
  29. Any argument that something is meaningful would have to justify it in terms of the meaningfulness of something else. But this can’t work; either there is an infinite regress, or it’s circular, or you come to something whose meaningfulness can’t be justified.

(To be explicit: I think each of these is wrong, and intend to explain why.)

Metablog

The New Age: appeal and limits

New Age FAIL

The New Age promised an Aquarian Revolution: a total, global transformation of consciousness. It has not delivered, as yet. I suspect, on the contrary, that the Age of Aquarius is drawing to an end.

The New Age was a response to particular historical circumstances that have passed. Understanding its appeal and limits may cast light on the emerging “pop spirituality,” which is similar in some ways and critically different in others.1

The New Age developed as an alternative to the restrictive, consensus 1950s world-view the Baby Boomers grew up in. In religion, the only 1950s choices were Christian and Jewish sects. In politics and economics, the only choices were capitalism and communism, which were seen as monolithic opposing ideologies. In society, the ideal was a nuclear two-parent heterosexual family with 2.3 children. Advances in science, technology, and industrial production made the idea of material Progress as an inevitable force compelling.2

Although some of these systems are superficially opposed, they all are forms of eternalist↗︎︎ dualism↗︎︎. “Eternalist” means that they see meaning as provided by an unchanging transcendent order. “Dualist” means that they uphold various hard-line distinctions. People are individuals clearly separated from each other; from nature; and from divinity. Definite choices must be made between competing systems, which must be either right or wrong. Social groups—classes, countries, races—are immutably different, and inherently conflicting.

Many in the Baby Boom generation rejected this consensus, and sought other systems. Mostly, the alternatives they found were forms of eternalist monism↗︎︎. These systems also see meaning as derived from a transcendent order (eternalism), but assert that the supposed separations of dualism are illusory (monism). Among dozens of other systems, astrology, parapsychology, eco-spirituality, quantum mysticism, and naturopathy—despite addressing quite different subjects—share this underlying philosophy. The phrase “New Age” was popularized as an umbrella term to cover them all. Despite the “New” in the name, these systems mainly developed in Nineteenth Century Europe, influenced by German Romantic Idealism.

These monist systems are based on accurate insights into the errors of dualism. None of the separations dualism imposes are absolute. Insisting that these lines cannot be crossed is a major source of misery.

Alternative models of healing were a major part of the New Age’s appeal. Mainstream medicine’s ideology is dualist nihilism↗︎︎. The body is a machine that sometimes needs adjustment; the mind is entirely separate from it and irrelevant to its function; spirit is non-existent. Conversely, dualist eternalism sees the body as inherently morally corrupt; something to be disciplined, neglected, or repudiated. Both approaches came to seem quite wrong.

The problem with the New Age

The problem with the New Age is that you have to believe and do stupid things. Mostly its specific systems are silly, if you take details seriously. This has limited its growth. Most people have little patience with crystal healing and angelic spirit guides from Atlantis. (Or whatever is happening in the FAIL photo↗︎︎ at the top of this page.3)

A few New Age adherents are seriously committed to a specific system. They spend years studying a complex, intellectually pretentious theoretical framework.

Most New Agers, though, hold to individual systems only lightly. They flit from one alternative healing method to another; they claim to believe in several incompatible religions at once; their actual lifestyles have little to do with their professed ideals.

For most New Agers, details are irrelevant. The specifics are, in fact, Nineteenth Century historical baggage.

For the client of a New Age healer, the mumbo-jumbo doesn’t matter. What is important is the healer’s recognition of the client as a whole person—body, mind, and spirit—who is also inseparably connected with all living beings. What qualifies the healer is not conceptual knowledge of astrological charts, maps of energy channels, or the pairwise interactions of flower essences. What qualifies the healer is her deep intuitive connection to the Cosmos as a whole.

Allegiance to the New Age is based on rejection of the only apparent alternatives: eternalist and nihilist dualism. If those are wrong, it may seem that monism must be right; and until recently, the New Age was the only available form of monism.

The sticking point is that it is not possible to participate in the New Age without adopting (however lightly or temporarily) one or more of the silly systems that make it up.

  • 1. What I write in this page is impressionistic, and unsupported by any specific evidence. This may be dangerously careless. On the other hand, I am not really interested in the New Age for its own sake. Instead, my goal here is to differentiate it from what I take to be its successor, what I am calling “contemporary pop spirituality,” about which I’ll say much more later.
  • 2. Of course, there were some people who rejected all these. However, they were a tiny marginal minority; whereas by 1990 alternatives had mass appeal.
  • 3. This is an internet joke meme: superimposing “FAIL” on images illustrating idiocy.

Metablog

Post-apocalyptic life in American health care

TL;DR:

  • Much of my time for the past year has been spent navigating the medical maze on behalf of my mother, who has dementia.
  • I observe that American health care organizations can no longer operate systematically, so participants are forced to act in the communal mode, as if in the pre-modern world.
  • Health care is one leading edge of a general breakdown in systematicity—while, at the same time, employing sophisticated systematic technologies.
  • Communal-mode interpersonal skills may become increasingly important to life success—not less, as techies hope.
  • For complex health care problems, I recommend hiring a consultant to provide administrative (not medical!) guidance.

Epistemic status: impressionistic blogging during a dazed lull between an oncologist and an MRI. No attempt to validate with statistical data or knowledgeable sources.

No system

My mother’s mild dementia began accelerating rapidly a year ago. I’ve been picking up pieces of her life as she drops them. That has grown from a part-time job to a full-time job. In the past month, as she’s developed unrelated serious medical issues, it’s become a way-more-than-full-time job.

The most time-consuming aspect has been coordinating the dozens of different institutions involved in her care. I had read that the biggest failing of the American health care system is its fragmentation; I’ve now spent hundreds of hours observing that first-hand.

There is, in fact, no system. There are systems, but mostly they don’t talk to each other. I have to do that.

It’s been fascinating watching people working in hospitals and medical offices trying and failing to communicate with each other. I’ll tell one story, and then explain a pattern. This is the most dramatic instance I’ve encountered so far, but is typical in form.

The short version is that at least seven experts spent roughly ten full-time days trying to find out a basic fact about my mother’s insurance, and finally failed. Meanwhile, many thousands of dollars were wasted on unnecessary hospitalization.

This is a stark example of medical cost disease↗︎︎, but the post is not about that. It’s about how institutions fail to talk to each other—and what that implies about our future.

(If the story gets boring, you can skip ahead to my interpretation of the pattern.)

My mother went into the hospital a month ago with severe pain in her hip. (It’s still undiagnosed.) After two days, she was medically ready for discharge from the hospital: whatever the pain was, it wasn’t one they could help with. Instead, she should be sent to a “skilled nursing facility” (SNF) where she’d get “physical therapy,” i.e. leg exercises.

For a SNF to agree to take her, they had to get confirmation from an insurance company that insurance would cover her stay. She has two kinds of health insurance, Medicare plus coverage through a private insurer (Anthem). Which would cover her? Or both, or neither?

SNFs have admissions officers, whose full-time job is to answer this question. Two different SNFs started working on the problem. I talked with the admissions people every day. Both claimed to be working on it more-or-less full-time. The hospital wanted to free up my mother’s bed, so their insurance person was also working on it.

Days passed. The hospital doctor on rounds said “Well, this is typical, especially with Anthem. It’s costing them several thousand dollars a day to keep her here, versus a few hundred dollars a day in a SNF, but it might take a week for them to figure out which local SNF they cover. Don’t worry, they’ll sort it out eventually.”

Meanwhile, I learned that Anthem and Medicare were confused about their relationship. (As far as I can tell, this was a coincidence and not the underlying problem, although I’m still not sure.) Medicare believed that my mother (who retired in 1997) is employed and therefore ineligible. Her Anthem coverage is through her former employer.

I talked with her ex-employer’s benefits person (whose full-time job is understanding insurance, pretty much). She looked into it and said she couldn’t understand what was going on. She called the company’s outside insurance consultant. He couldn’t understand what was going on. He called people he knew at Medicare and Anthem. He said that they couldn’t understand it either, but that multiple people in both organizations were working on straightening it out.

A week later, I called Medicare to verify that it worked. The surprisingly competent customer service person looked up my mother’s info and said: “This is really weird… I don’t know what’s going on… there was a record that said Anthem is primary. And then on November 16th, there’s a note that said it’s deleted, and Medicare is primary. But then there’s an update on the 18th that says Anthem is primary. But obviously since your mother is 84 she’s not employed, so Medicare should be primary… I’ll delete the record again…”

After three days of trying, one of the SNFs gave up. I talked to the admissions dude there. I’ll call him Paul. He was smart and friendly, and he was willing to explain:

My full-time job for ten years has been understanding how to get insurance to pay us, and I have no idea how the system works. Even if I somehow learned how it works, it changes completely every year, and I would have to start over. But at most of the insurance companies I know people who can sometimes make things happen, so I call them up, and then they try to figure out how it works. But Anthem… I spent hours and hours on hold, and in phone trees, getting transferred from one department to another, and eventually back to where I started. The most clueful-sounding person I could find sent me to a web site that just says ‘This program is not implemented yet.’ Does ‘program’ mean software, or does it mean some project they haven’t got going?

Hospitals are bad places that make you ill; you don’t want to spend any more time there than you have to. On day six, I said “if she doesn’t go to a SNF today, I’m taking her home—the risk of her dying there seems less now than the risk of her dying here.” That got results: the other SNF agreed to take her “on spec.” Their admissions person was reasonably confident that either Anthem or Medicare would pay, even though neither was willing to say either yes or no ahead of time.

The SNF called me to tell me they needed my mother’s records from the hospital. Well, what do you want me to do about that? We need you to call the hospital and ask them to fax us the records. “Fax”? Why not send clay tablets in wicker baskets on the back of a donkey?

No interface

To ship a package by FedEx, you don’t need to call someone who knows someone who knows someone. You go to a web site, put in some numbers, it gives you back some numbers, you put them on the envelope, drop it in a box, and it appears at a farmhouse on an island in Lapland the next day.

If Amazon sends you the wrong type of cable adapter, you don’t have to call them up and try to act pathetic and virtuous in order to convince someone that you need and deserve a refund because your poor mother is so ill. You go to a web site and push a button.

FedEx and Amazon have systematic interfaces. They are transparent on the outside, and black boxes on the inside. You don’t have to know anything about how they operate in order to use them.

Health care organizations are—at best—the opposite. They may run on systems internally, but the interface is opaque. There’s no defined way to get them to do something.

This is not their fault.

No fault

I was trying to get my mother into a SNF—but all I could do was talk to Paul, who couldn’t say yes or no. It wasn’t his fault. He was trying to talk to people at Anthem, who couldn’t say yes or no. Was that their fault?

Just speculating, I imagine they are supposed to apply 1600 pages of rules for what’s covered in what situation. And the rules are vague and conflicting and change constantly, and who can read 1600 pages of rules anyway? So eventually someone has to make up a yes-or-no answer on the basis of what seems more-or-less reasonable. Whoever it is could get blamed if someone higher up later decides that was “wrong” based on their interpretation of the rules, so it’s better to pass the buck.

Are the confused rules Anthem’s fault? I imagine that the 1600 pages try to reconcile federal, state, and local legislation, plus the rules of three federal regulatory agencies, nine state agencies, and fifteen local agencies. All those are vague and conflicting and constantly changing, but Anthem’s rule-writing department does their best. They call the agencies to try to find out what the regulations are supposed to mean, and they spend hours on hold, are transferred from one official to another and back, and eventually get directed to a .gov web site that says “program not implemented yet.” Then they make something up, and hope that when the government sues Anthem, they don’t get blamed for it personally.

I imagine people working in legislative offices and regulatory agencies find themselves in a similar position.

In this maze, even competent people with good intentions cannot act systematically. Their work depends on coordinating with other institutions that have no systematic interface.

Traditional life in the ruins of systematicity

It’s like one those post-apocalyptic science fiction novels whose characters hunt wild boars with spears in the ruins of a modern city. Surrounded by machines no one understands any longer, they have reverted to primitive technology.

Except it’s in reverse. Hospitals can still operate modern material technologies (like an MRI) just fine. It’s social technologies that have broken down and reverted to a medieval level.

Systematic social relationships↗︎︎ involve formally-defined roles and responsibilities. That is, “professionalism.” But across medical organizations, there are none. Who do you call at Anthem to find out if they’ll cover an out-of-state SNF stay? No one knows.

What do you do when systematicity breaks down? You revert to what I’ve described as the “communal mode↗︎︎” or “choiceless mode.” That is, “pre-modern,” or “traditional” ways of being.

Working in a medical office is like living in a pre-modern town. It’s all about knowing someone who knows someone who knows someone who can get something done. Several times, I’ve taken my mother to a doctor who said something like: “She needs lymphedema treatment, and the only lymphedema clinic around here is booked months in advance, but I know someone there, and I think I can get her in next week.” Or, “The pathology report on this biopsy is only one sentence, and it’s unsigned. The hospital that faxed it to me doesn’t know who did it. I need details, so I called all the pathologists I know, and none of them admit to writing it, so we are going to need to do a new biopsy.”

But at the same time, each clinic does have an electronic patient records management system, which does work some of the time. And there are professional relationships with defined roles that operate effectively within the building.

I suspect increasing “patchiness” of systems may be typical of our post-systematic atomized era. Understanding the medical case may help predict the texture of cultural and social life as atomization proceeds.

A central research topic in ethnomethodology is the relationship between formal rationality (such as an insurance company’s 1600 pages of unworkable rules) and “mere reasonableness,” which is what people mostly use to get a job done. The disjunction between electronic patient records and calling around town to try to find out who wrote a biopsy report that arrived by fax seems sufficiently extreme that it may produce a qualitatively new way of being.

I would like to ask:

  • How does health care continue to function at all?
  • Can it continue to function at all?
  • How do people within the ex-system navigate a world that mashes up high-tech infrastructure that only sometimes works with pre-modern social relationships across organizations?
  • How do they understand this contrast? How do they cope personally?1
  • What can we do about it?

Maybe an ethnomethodological understanding of how health care organizations operate in practice could make the systems work incrementally better. Maybe an enlightened COO could incorporate the view that the systems and reality are only vaguely related. But… it may be impossible to improve individual organizations.

No local fix

It’s obvious how to fix health care. Just make everything run systematically, like FedEx or Amazon. There are no technical or business obstacles to this. Anyone who understands IT and/or business can see how to do it.2

Back-of-envelope calculations say a working health care system would deliver dramatically better quality at 10-20% of the current cost.

Health care is notionally a profit-driven free market. This looks like an easy opportunity to make trillions of dollars by making the world better for everyone. Why doesn’t someone do that?

It appears that 73% of the labor cost of a health care organization is spent on trying to communicate with other health care organizations that have no defined interface.3 Patrick Collison has suggested↗︎︎ calling this pattern “Leibenstein’s Inefficiency↗︎︎ Disease,” by analogy to Baumol’s Cost Disease↗︎︎. An organization can’t improve the 73% by much on its own; that inefficiency is forced on it by the environment it operates in.

Instead, organizations in sectors afflicted with inefficiency disease try to push their own administrative work outside. Both out into other organizations, and—more visibly—they force it onto you, the customer. It’s your job to fill out forms they could have done more efficiently themselves. When they screw up, you have to try to fix it. This negative externality could be called “paperwork pollution,” by analogy with negative externalities of smokestack industries.

Standardizing an interface between health care providers and insurance companies would be a huge win. No matter how badly designed, it would be better than the current mess, and save several percent of US GDP. That would need cooperation from most of the major players in the industry. Other industries manage that routinely: machine screws and futures contracts come in standard sizes, without which manufacturing and finance would be as inefficient as health care. The need for a standard insurer/provider interface is obvious. Since it’s lacking, I imagine some powerful group extracts enormous rents from the inefficiency. I know nothing about that, so I won’t speculate.

You will need village life skills

Perhaps American health care is a bellwether model for the future of other aspects of life in the post-systemic world? A pattern that occurs in many other sectors: as systems fail, people fall back on innate communal logic. Politics and the media are obvious current examples.

The hope of the tech industry is that “software is eating the world↗︎︎,” as Marc Andreessen put it in 2011. That is, we’re FedEx-izing every aspect of the economy: making it radically more efficient and reliable, using well-designed IT-supported systematic business processes.

In that world, systematic-mode skills (especially programming and finance) will be ever more valuable. Hooray! We will create a utopia for all, in which (for once) those of us with high-functioning autism get properly rewarded.

In 2017, software is conspicuously not eating the cost-disease economic sectors: health care, education, housing, government. They are being eaten—by communal mode tribalism.

In 2017, tribalists are threatening to eat the tech industry.

There’s a possible future in which all systems fall to tribalism. Then everyone dies, because tribal signaling does not deliver electric power. In another possible future, we create a meta-systematic society that addresses the inherent defects of both tribalism and systematicity. (I discussed both these possibilities tangentially in “A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse.” I hope to write more soon.)

In the short run, more likely, current trends will continue. Additional aspects of life will increasingly revert to the communal mode, but some critical systems will fend off the barbarians and limp along well enough to keep us alive.

In that world, people skills will be ever more valuable. Surviving and thriving in 2037 may depend mainly on who you can charm, who you know, and whether they owe you favors.

Techies take note.

You might consider working in a medical office, to get some practice.

Hire a consultant

Some more-serious, practical advice:

If you find yourself in a situation like mine, hire an independent health care administration consultant. Their job is to know administrative people inside organizations who can get stuff done. They also know what can be gotten done, which is unknowable to the public. They can also deal with inscrutable paperwork and organizational screw-ups.

Hiring someone became imperative for me when coordinating my mother’s care got to be a way-more-than-full-time job. (In retrospect, I wish I had done that months earlier.)

It could also be worthwhile in less critical cases, if no one in the family can take enough time off from work, or in which you’d simply rather pay someone else to clean up after a hospital’s paperwork pollution.

This role has developed only recently, as systems have broken down. There’s not yet a standardized term; “health care advocate” is one among several.

Mine specializes in gerontology and dementia. Others specialize in other disease areas; or in other aspects of the administrative nightmare, such as sorting out bogus hospital bills, which frequently include fraudulent additions.

They are not inexpensive (mine charges $150/hour), so not an option for everyone.

There are good and not-so-good advocates. I spoke with several before hiring one. Some were clearly clueless; the one I hired last month has seemed consistently competent.

Since they recommend particular providers, there is an inherent principal-agent problem. Ask if they get any compensation from services they recommend. Take their recommendations with a grain of salt in any case.

  • 1. I imagine for many it’s awful. “Communal” sounds “nice,” but most are in medicine because they want to help others, and they can’t get their jobs done when the system breaks down.
  • 2. Step 1: Throw away the ubiquitous fax machines. Sink or swim. Hire donkeys if necessary.
  • 3. The number 73% is my dazed estimate based on informal observation and analysis conducted in doctors’ examination rooms.

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